MALAGA.- Over the Influence celebrates Erik Parker’s museum retrospective, Easy Freedom, presented at The Contemporary Art Center of Málaga (Málaga, Spain), on view through August 28, 2022. Curated by Fernando Francés, the exhibition features a selection of over forty artworks in a variety of techniques spanning 1999 to the present, the most comprehensive presentation in Europe.
Inspired by American subculture: underground comics, graffiti, and the raucous, hallucinatory palette of vintage counterculture. Parker creates powerful explosions of color ranging from idealized landscapes to scenes of social commentary. The result is boisterous, irreverent, and immediately recognizable.
Like a visual freestyle, Parker’s work seamlessly combines elements of contemporary culture into a narrative flow of politics, music, internet memes, hallucinatory dreams, conspiracy theories, and the hieroglyphics of various subcultures. Rebellious and youthful and packed with an array of reference materials, Parker’s compositions often feature vintage magazine clippings from the late 1970s to the early 1980s with his signature palette of personally mixed and named colors, using up to 200 different shades in each painting. “Parker has developed a distinctive visual vocabulary, through the manipulation of found imagery and an interest in popular culture. ‘The idea,’ the artist has stated, ‘is to take something familiar and make it strange.’”
Erik Parker (b.1968, Stuttgart, Germany; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY)
Received his BFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 1996, studying under the artist Peter Saul, and completed his MFA from SUNY Purchase, New York in 1998. Parker has exhibited widely around the world, notable museum exhibitions include the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; De Appel, Amsterdam; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX; Cornerhouse Museum of Contemporary Art, Manchester, UK. Select solo gallery presentations include Over the Influence, Hong Kong; Mary Boone Gallery, New York; Galería Javier López, Madrid, Spain; and RE-UPPED, Colette, Paris, France.
Parker’s work is included in numerous prestigious collections including The Brooklyn Museum, NY; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Montreal Museum of Fine Art, Montreal, Canada; and Faurschou Foundation, Copenhagen, DK.
Erik Parker will be presenting a new body of work at Over the Influence Los Angeles from 20 November to 23 December 2022.
