Bio
Eric Nash is a California artist working in oil and charcoal. His subject matter focuses on icons and scenes inspired by California. Often highly realistic, his images are pared down to their idealized essence often conveying a film still or a memory. He works in series, some of which go back decades.
Eric began painting and exhibiting his work at an early age. He received a BFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on scholarship. He has had multiple solo shows in California since 2000. He is currently represented by leading galleries in Los Angeles and Palm Springs. His work is collected by noted art collectors worldwide including many well-known Hollywood names, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and corporations. He has been the subject of numerous media articles and his work has been featured at Tucson Museum of Art, Laguna Art Museum, Riverside Art Museum, Hilbert Museum of California Art, and Palm Springs Art Museum. He currently lives and works in the high desert town of Yucca Valley, California next to Joshua Tree National Park.
Commentary
California artist Eric Nash creates expansive nighttime paintings of urban sprawl coined "California noir." At once romantic and ominous, his mysterious landscapes are moody yet promising, with the glow and hum of vast expanses of city lights hugging the horizon in the pitch-black sky. Nash is well-known for his realistic paintings of highway signs imbued with narratives of the places they announce. His large nocturnal works are reduced to the essential elements of land and light.
– Julie Sasse / Chief Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, Tucson Museum of Art
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Romantic, dangerous and mysterious, Eric Nash’s “most recent work falls into two divergent but fundamentally related series: crisply rendered, Pop-inflected images of freeway exit and gas station signs, and loosely expressive nighttime vistas sweeping toward light-peppered horizons. "The signs," he says, "are both stories and places." His paintings which in both pristine realist and gestural impressionistic modes consistently demonstrate a reductive essentialism more like haiku than sonnet.
– Shana Nys Dambrot / Los Angeles Art Critic, Journalist and Author
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As a city of freeways, signs, and signals, these visions of Nash’s Los Angeles appear as if seen from the car window, the essential way to experience LA. The artist imbues each setting with a mysterious suspense, an allusion to seductive film imagery he has coined as California Noir. A nod to the film industry, the exhibition title Western Pictures is a clever innuendo that combines the imagery of Los Angeles as the birthplace of modern film, while also showcasing a romantic nostalgia of the sprawling cityscape. Transcending time, these portraits of place act as spaces of pure storytelling.
– Merry Karnowsky, Director and Curator of KP Projects, Los Angeles
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Currently on view at KP Projects Chinatown in Los Angeles, California and in association with Launch LA is artist Eric Nash’s darkly moving solo exhibition “Western Pictures.”
Featuring exceptional photorealistic charcoal drawings documenting the ever-mysterious idea of Los Angeles (not only as a place) which - at least to me - seems a location wrought with the very idea of dreams becoming a physical possibility, allowing these drawings to incorporate a sense of beautiful unreality.
– Supersonicart.com
CV
Curriculum Vitae of exhibitions, bibliography and collectors on request
