Erik Groff - Featured Artist

“I really like presenting in the studio/lab, with paint on the walls, and the mess. To me that’s the best and most real part of the painting’s life, before it is put to rest with a signature and potentially just crated away and forgotten.” –Erik Groff

Warpath (in progress), 2009

Erik Groff is a multi-media artist whose work ranges from two-dimensional pieces to installations, the sites of which might be a pristine gallery space, a vacant lot or a clogged street in midtown Manhattan. Regardless of media or venue, Groff’s creativity, and the artwork born of it, contain a sense of exploration with boundary.

Groff’s abstract paintings exemplify his affection for the process of art making. However, his process never overshadows the highly aesthetic products he creates. Working out of the tradition of abstract expressionism, Groff’s paintings are an affirmation of the painted surface as the highest reality of the work. There is no spatial illusion, narrative or allegory. A clear antecedent of Groff’s work are the paintings of Willem DeKooning, due in part to the formal cohesion achieved through an emphasis on line.

Duration, 22x22in., Oil on Paper, 2005

Hunting and Searching, 30x40in., Oil on Paper, 2007 The function of line in Groff’s paintings show the work to be an exuberant celebration of art making, as opposed to a record of existential agony. Groff’s use of line gives all of his work, be it an installation, sculpture or painting, a striking graphic impact akin to cartoons or comic books. A genial sense of humor pervades even Groff’s most abstract works. As in the paintings of Roberto Matta, Groff’s line work can be used to organize visual themes that seem like dancing figures, over layered swathes of vibrant color.

Lines in more utilitarian forms of representation, such as maps and grids, frequently denote borders and boundaries. In this way lines define area and form by a system of opposition. They are the visual language of separation and exclusion. In the paintings of Erik Groff, gestures of bodily quickness, mental acuity and zeal are recorded in his use of lines-- they are not boundaries at all.

Painting for Lowell, 30x40in. Oil on Paper, 2007