Two Waters

ABRI MARS is honored to announce Two Waters, a thirty-year survey of ink paintings by Eric Wolf. Rooted in the rigorous constraints of black ink, the exhibition traces Wolf's evolving visual language executed entirely en plein air across sites of enduring significance to the artist. A notable figure from a new generation of American landscape painters in the 1990s, Wolf's recognition emerged from his ability to synthesize the perceptual immediacy of the Hudson River School with the graphic rigor of high modernism. His exhibitions garnered acclaim from leading critics, including Roberta Smith and Holland Cotter of The New York Times. Despite early momentum, Wolf made the radical decision to withdraw from the commercial art world of New York City. Over the following twenty years, his unadulterated interrogation of singular terrains formed an intimate bond with two specific bodies of water in Chatham, New York, and Rangeley, Maine. Restriction to these sites over a significant period allowed Wolf to move past the novelty of the view and into deeper communion with the structural substance of the landscape. Often working through the elements, Wolf favors the isolation of rainy days when the fogged environments are reduced to their most essential form. Engaging with an austere chosen medium, the ink works must be completed within a day, if not hours, depending on the outdoor conditions. Drawing on his early background in photography, Wolf applies a darkroom vocabulary of high-contrast tonality to translate the organic world into rhythmic contours. His distinct brushwork reflects the precision of a woodcut while retaining the fluid impulse of ink. Wolf dissolves the barrier between artist and environment, at times mixing his ink with water drawn directly from the source he is depicting. Two Waters offers an opportunity to view the evolution of a painter who, for the last three decades, has worked in intimate dialogue with the natural world.