Eric Aho: Wild Meadow

Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

(excerpt from Robert Duncan, “Often I Am Permitted to Return to A Meadow,” 1960)

DC Moore Gallery is pleased to present Eric Aho: Wild Meadow, an exhibition of new paintings. Following his last exhibition, Threshold, which explored the spaces where forest and wetlands meet, Aho’s series of new work emerges out through the woods into the light and air of an open meadow. Aho embraces the meadow a space of contradictions, both still and humming with life, unruly yet organized by mysterious systems.

The meadow represents a formative landscape for Aho–– in Finnish, “aho” translates to “forest glade” or “wild meadow.” Aho explores the capacity for landscape painting to double as self-portraiture, to trace the narrative of our lives as shaped by the landscape. The multiple canvases of the eponymous Wild Meadow (70 x 234 inches) collapse and expand the distance between the actual and remembered. Shifting between immediate and wide focal points, Aho’s brushwork and sensitivity for the painted surface captures the lush, entangled environment. Looking in and between the forms of wildflowers, grasses, mists, and fireflies, radiating forms and convex shapes evoke the movement of light and air.

The wild meadow paintings are horizontal, some epically scaled, contrasting with the verticality of the forested landscape. The works follow a chronology, a personal timeline that mirror the transitions of nature: the changing of the seasons, day moving into night, cycles of bloom and decay. In nature, meadows form through processes of natural succession, growing in the basin of a former glacier, for example, or in the aftermath of dramatic events such as forest fire. In the monumental Snow Meadow (70 x 200 inches), dried wildflowers and grasses poke through the drifts of snow, offering a hopeful vision of resilience and regrowth.

In contrast to the wild, ever-changing meadow, Aho also looks to the elaborate still life arrangements of cut flowers in 17th century Dutch paintings for his Dutch Meadow nocturnes. Like Aho’s meadow paintings, Dutch flower paintings are rich in symbolic detail, with meaning imbued by the choice of flower, state of bloom or decay. Aho reimagines these compositions as if in a meadow at night, the flowers animated by the shadows and a bright interior light.

An illustrated catalogue with an essay by Willard Spiegelman, “Eric Aho: A Poet’s Painter,” accompanies this exhibition.

Eric Aho lives and works in Saxtons River, Vermont. Recent solo exhibitions of his work include Eric Aho: An Unfinished Point in a Vast Surrounding at the New Britain Museum of American Art, CT (2016); and Eric Aho: Ice Cuts at the Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH (2016). His works are held in the permanent collections of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, NY; Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH; Denver Art Museum, CO; Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA; Fleming Museum, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT; Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; The Neuberger Museum of Art, SUNY, NY; New Britain Museum of American Art, CT; and the Oulu Museum of Art, Finland, among others.

For press inquiries, please contact Caroline Magavern at cmagavern@dcmooregallery.com.

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October 4 - November 9, 2024

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