NEW YORK, NY.- Eric N. Mack radically reconsiders the conventions of painting using textiles as his primary materials. For his second exhibition with Paula Cooper Gallery, Mack presents new free-standing and wall-based paintings, along with a site-responsive installation. This exhibition, titled after a text by the artist quoted in full below, follows recent one-person exhibitions at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, as well as residencies at the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky, and BOFFO, Fire Island, New York.

Both invoking and disrupting the flat pictorial plane, Mack’s abstract compositions occupy space in ways that challenge traditional understandings of painting. The works may be wall-based, wrapped around a metal stretcher (the traditional support for canvas), or pinned directly to the wall, but they may also extend freely into architectural space. Influenced by the expansion of painting into environmental installations by artists such as Sam Gilliam, Robert Rauschenberg, and Christo and Jean-Claude, Mack extends their legacy through a contemporary lens. Using textiles rife with fashion and cultural references, Mack incorporates new and vintage materials in a range of textures, colors and weights. These richly layered pieces move between opposing conditions: movement and stillness, transparency and opacity, volume and flatness, monochrome and pattern.

Mack’s ongoing exploration of materiality and composition begins with the pliability of fabric. Using textiles and garments drawn from his personal archive, sourced from fabric and thrift stores, he cuts, rips, dyes, sews, glues and pins the materials into new configurations. Their original forms become obscured, while their distinctive material qualities remain legible. This tension between recognition and abstraction is central to Mack’s practice, which he describes through the injunction to “turn your back to the lens as a gesture to abstract one’s own form.”





In the exhibition, these altered materials encounter sleek stainless steel custom armatures that Mack describes as “hybrid readymade structures.” Elsewhere, suspended textiles hover, fold, and drift from the walls and ceilings as staged interventions in the gallery’s architecture. In the center of the gallery, sheer mesh and printed fabric descend from the ceiling, disrupting sightlines and prompting movement through the space, as Mack choreographs the viewer’s interaction with his work. Through their multi-dimensionality, the works resist a single, comprehensive perspective: as one aspect comes into view, another is inevitably concealed.