With this exhibition, Eric Stotik presents small, intimate paintings that raise questions about identity, loss, interconnection and the human condition. Incorporating dreamlike figures and settings that demand close looking, Stotik’s paintings probe a sometimes surreal vision of human experience and its potential for loss with a technique and skill that is breathtaking. While some images evoke the devastation of war or an apocalyptic time, others exude a sense of primal peace or solitude, moving viewers from one pole of experience to another.
Eric Stotik grew up between Papua, New Guinea and Melbourne, Australia. As an adult, he came to Portland to study art at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, where he graduated in 1985. He won the prestigious Betty Bowen Memorial Award in 1994 and was Artist in Residence at the Vivian and Gordon Gilkey Center for the Graphic Arts, Portland Art Museum in 1997. He was named the Regional Arts & Culture Council’s 2011 Fellow in Visual Arts. He has shown his work extensively throughout the Northwest, and his work is included in the collections of the Hallie Ford Museum at Willamette University, Salem; the Portland Art Museum; the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah; Idaho State University; the New York Public Library; and Yale University.