From RULE Gallery:

"RULE Gallery is delighted to present Eric Blum: Paintings. This solo exhibition marks the artist’s third with the gallery and first in our Marfa location. The exhibition opens with a public reception on Friday, November 29, from 5-7pm and will be on view through February 15, 2025. Gallery hours are Wednesday- Saturday, 11am to 5pm.

Eric Blum’s paintings invite viewers into the margins of perception—those liminal spaces where the boundaries of form and amorphousness blur. Developed through delicate layers of ink-drenched silk and beeswax, Blum's compositions hover between the tangible and the ephemeral, the actual and the perceived. His expansive palette ranges across each painting, offering shades of lush green, plum brown, and ice cream pink—building atmospheres that resist immediate recognition, rewarding slow and contemplative engagement.

Blum’s artistic process is a balance of intention and intuition, guided by chance and transformation. Initial drawings serve as the foundation for his works, but through a series of flips, rotations, and excisions, the original forms are often fragmented or entirely transformed. These layered "misunderstandings," as Blum calls them, result in dreamlike anagrams of his initial ideas—each painting a visual puzzle that lingers like the fading remnants of a memory.

Each painting conjures an ethereal space where shapes seem to materialize and dissipate in the same breath, inviting viewers into a realm both within reach and beyond - an evocation of the moment between waking and sleeping, where reality and the subconscious briefly touch. Blum challenges perceptions of abstraction as inaccessible, instead presenting it as an invitation to linger, observe, and discover meaning within the ephemeral and the ambiguous.

Eric Blum (b. 1956) was born and raised in California and now lives and works in New York. He has been represented by RULE Gallery in Denver since the 1990s, debuting with a solo exhibition in 1998. Blum’s work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions across the U.S. and internationally, with notable shows in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, Santa Fe, Denver, Madrid, and Paris. His work has been showcased at institutions such as The Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, the Kresge Art Museum, the Knoxville Art Museum, the Montclair Art Museum, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Work by Blum is held in numerous corporate and private collections around the world. Blum has twice received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award in 1998 and 2001. Blum has also been honored as a recipient of the 2008 New York Foundation for the Arts award."