Eric Sall
Something Amidst Nothing, was Eric Sall's second solo exhibition at JNG in Kansas City. The exhibition featured several new large and small scale paintings, some completed just prior to, and others during the first few months of his residency at the Roswell Artist in Residence Program in New Mexico in 2001. Several recent works on paper were also included in the exhibition.
Eric does such a great job of describing the thinking behind his work, we presented in full his statement about it at the time, partially reproduced here:
"The paintings in this show are a result of my continued interest in how groupings of various shapes, marks, colors, and gestures, put together with seemingly little context, can still render themselves as familiar images. This idea of seeing "something" amidst "nothing" is not unlike that of the famous Rorschach Test, where a person being tested tells what is suggested to them by a standard series of inkblot designs. Unlike the Rorschach inkblots though, my paintings are not merely random images. Instead, the paintings themselves and the resulting images originate in my passion for the process of painting, specifically a passion for making rich fields of color, a keenness for painting straight lines and edges of shapes, and a strong desire to muck things up by pulling paint across the surface with various knives and brushes..."
Eric Sall, Something Amidst Nothing, installation view
Eric Sall, Something Amidst Nothing, installation view