Aho is an accomplished painter from southern Vermont whose work garners interest from a growing clientele of international collectors. Increasingly complex and elegant, Aho’s current work demonstrates a radical departure from his previous, primarily representational, New England landscapes. The new works are compositionally intense, focusing on mass and its physicality: rock in the quarry, ice in the river, and the mass of a barn wall – the artist’s most quintessential New England subjects stripped to their most essential elements.

The exhibition’s central thesis is the “quarry” and Aho’s compositions feature the “stubborn frontality of the rock surface, that resists as much as it invites,” as Helen Vendler, noted critic, observes. “They refuse to be pliable, inviting, welcoming... they offer a wall, a cliff-face, a solid slab, a taciturn and frontal confrontation. They stop the eye; they are prophetic and severe, and they are radically beautiful in their unyieldingness.”

In the exhibition catalog Peter Campion writes: “If the balance between representation and abstraction occurs in single paintings, it also happens throughout the series. In a painting like Squared Wall, Aho makes from the shapes and the perspectives of his other quarry paintings a wholly original composition, with its audacious sheets of white and gray, sudden zigzags, and shifts of tone. Alternating between these different approaches, he is nothing if not true to felt experience, to the lived process in which fact and imagination push and pull against each other.

Eric Aho has a ranginess, even a restlessness. In all of his paintings, each shape and color fulfills its potential, and brims with energy. By dwelling in that space where the given world and the imagination interchange, he manages to capture and embody those moments when we see and feel nature for its own particularity and for its emotional force. In painting after painting, Aho frees himself and his viewers from the usual categories and concepts of contemporary art, and returns us to the experience of sheer vivacity.”

For Immediate Release September 30, 2005 Eric Aho October 20th - December 3rd, 2005 UBS SPONSORS LECTURE BY ERIC AHO AT NATIONAL ACADEMY The “Art of Leadership” Art Lecture Series and Reeves Contemporary are co-hosting “An Evening With Artist Eric Aho” at the National Academy Museum on October 6th. The event is by invitation only, however, a DVD on the artist’s process is available through the gallery. In this talk, Mr. Aho will speak about the inspiration behind his paintings, the rapid rise in his career, and what it is like to be invested in a specific region, in this instance, the Connecticut River Valley in northern New England. A young painter whose work has garnered interest from a growing clientele of international collectors, Aho is an artist to watch. His work is increasingly complex and elegant, while still recapitulating the freshness of the landscapes he observes each day in northern New England. He states of his work, “I love to be aware of the contradictions that the landscape presents – that a hill can feel weightless, that a cloud can have immense proportion and weight and, in a sense, press the landscape down. In some way it’s really the sky that is the tangible element and the landscape fleeting.” Notes Helen Vendler, a distinguished critic of poetry and art, “In every work, we perceive some degree of abstractions. And in the eternal struggle between figuration and abstraction, Aho stubbornly refuses to let either tendency have the upper hand. It is the tension between abstract and the seen that distinguishes his masterly work.” In a review in Art in America, Joe Shannon observes: “At his best, Aho is capable of rivaling the speedy approximation, painterly application and, most importantly, the intuitive and poetic close-toned result of a Dickinson “first strike.” …We sense our huge world in a tumult of natural change…. His strongest works show this engagement and commitment – as well as a very personal achievement of premier coup quality.” Aho opens a show of new paintings at Reeves Contemporary on October 20th with a reception for the artist that evening between 6-8 p.m. Inquiries can be directed to the gallery, located at 535 West 24th Street, by calling 212-714-0044.