Eric Rhein: Visual Art

Eric Rhein uses the precision of a jeweler to create delicate constructions from wire, paper, monofilament, and appropriated objects such as sentimental bits of jewelry, discarded rusty bottle caps, gears, and crystals. Drawing on his Southern-gothic heritage of Appalachian Kentucky, Rhein explores the delicate and powerful connections among humans, nature, and the spiritual world where loss and rebirth connect the past with the future. His drawings and sculptures evoke a transcendent universe inhabited by leaves, birds, animals, and human figures that represent the metamorphosis of human relationships and experience. His sculptural explorations are simultaneously about absence and presence, the material and the ephemeral. The realm of science is also expressed in Rhein's artistic vision, at times conceptually and at other times concretely, through the incorporation of such objects as antique medical journals.

Rhein also weaves personal stories and experiences into thematic bodies of work. This includes The Leaf Project which he conceived in 1996 to pay tribute to people he has known who have died of complications from AIDS. As observed by noted AIDS activist and art historian, Robert Atkins, "Art has always played a role in coming to terms with collective tragedy, and the role of the artist has frequently been to bear witness. Surely an art of memory like Eric Rhein's can help harmonize our views by suggesting that honoring the past is one way to live more fully in the present."

Through art making, Rhein has found a gateway to look beyond the shadows cast by his heritage and has discovered light reflected in the human condition. His artwork often merges sexuality, beauty, and mortality. Holland Cotter of The New York Times writes that in Rhein's work "the combination of art and craft, delicacy and resiliency, feminine and masculine is exquisitely wrought and is, as it should be, seductive and disturbing."

Based in Manhattan, Eric Rhein has been exhibiting his sculptures and wire drawings for over 20 years in New York City and throughout the United States, as well as in London, Paris, Munich, Stockholm, and Tokyo. Publications that have reviewed and/or reproduced his artwork include: Art in America, Interview, The New York Times, Village Voice, Metrosource, POZ, The James White Review, Dutch Elle, and Vanity Fair. Rhein holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts. He has received grants from the Pollock/Krasner Foundation, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb, and Art Matters.