NYAB Event - Eric Clinton Anderson “Effortless as Fire”

Eric Clinton Anderson “Effortless as Fire”

Giacobetti Paul Gallery

This event has ended.

Sometimes I think I welcome in what you are frightened of;
My thoughts become undisciplined and then I slip away.
It is effortless… as fire.
— From the song “Insolence” by Shearwater

Giacobetti Paul Gallery presents “Effortless as Fire” a series of drawings and paintings By Eric Clinton Anderson.

In these works, Anderson continues his explorations of life in the increasingly fractured environments of present-‐day America. In these works we see Anderson further developing his narrative style, at once documentary yet deeply personal. His technique references many traditions within American art, but his subjects are starkly contemporary.

This series shows us the artist’s family target shooting together on his brother’s Missouri farm. Clearly there is joy in their play; however, there is also a sense of foreboding looming behind their activities. Anderson’s nephew Joshua, depicted in many of the pieces, took his life with a firearm on the same farm roughly two weeks after the events portrayed.

Through maintaining a carefully modulated degree of distance, the artist deftly skirts the temptation of making these into political works. Rather, we are invited to ask our own questions, to draw our own conclusions, and to share in the deeply ambiguous tragedy of this story.

The Artist

Eric Clinton Anderson’s work is a multi-‐faceted investigation of life in the varied landscapes of post-‐modern America. He has been written in New York Magazine, The Huffington Post, and L Magazine, among others. After having spent extensive time in California and the Midwest, he received his MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. This is his first solo show with Giacobetti Paul Gallery.