Erik Erikson

Erikson’s central imagery concerns itself with intrigue and a sense of surprise. His body of work is often dispersed with visual, tactile and intellectual delights that lead the viewer on their own form of discovery.

This journey of exploration and revelation will set the scene to visually process his multi-layering of visual information and startling originality. His ability to alter and rework his sculptural forms into new relationships is one of his important goals. Erikson’s surfaces and backgrounds, aged and appearing historical, are a result of his working on movie sets as well as inspiration from frequenting the collections at the Metropolitan Museum and American Museum of Natural History.

Erikson’s awareness of the aesthetic in sending things back in time is a result of studying the renaissance and other periods of art history. This infusion of historical art references has had a vital effect on his body of work.

Heavily influenced by the well known New York art dealer Allan Stone (who represented, among other giants, Joseph Cornell and Willem deKooning), Erikson has never departed from Stone’s insistence that “surprise” should remain with a piece of art no matter how long it is viewed. The discipline of archeology decodes messages of the past to find meanings of objects and classify them.

The portion of Erikson’s body work that deals with making his own artifacts, reveals a brief exploration of time past. Instead of a particular historical reference to his discoveries, Erikson’s personal expedition suggests something alluding to a distant past and different time. At times a form of surrealism becomes evident when he combines something contemporary and something aged, thus asking the viewer to consider its past and its future. For example, in “Turquoise Sky,” three dimensional segmented pears with baroque stems sitting on pedestals, are romantically placed in front of a Turner inspired sky.

This observation takes the viewer on a deeper understanding of the interplay. As a curator of his own “museum cases” in other work, Erikson’s personal vocabulary evokes images of extreme preciousness combined in miniature settings. Despite its minute scale his work commands presence and a sense of vastness. In his body of work, Erikson attempts to introduce sculpture to painting as a way of integrating the second and third dimensions.