Eric Stotik
Russo Lee Gallery is pleased to present new work of Eric Stotik in the exhibition Set. Stotik is well known regionally and nationally as a master painter with a surrealist vision, bordering on the dark and mysterious. With intense color and meticulous execution, his work reveals worlds within worlds, often examining where nature, man and culture collide. A performer and artist of the Post Punk generation, Stotik’s work has graced many CD covers and is also in many public and private collections. This is his sixth solo exhibition with the gallery.
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.
And the invaluable Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem has opened Louis Bunce: Dialogue with Modernism, a retrospective on the late Oregon artist, who Paul Sutinen, in his ArtsWatch review of the show, identifies as a key figure in the city’s cultural life, the catalyst for making Portland a city of modern art. “It is an important show,” Sutinen declares. “It is a great show. It is accompanied by a monograph on Bunce by Roger Hull. It is important. It is great.” And then he explains why. See the sort of thing that the Savonarolas of the federal purse are eager to upend.
The Russo Lee Gallery is featuring more drawings and paintings by Bunce (1907-83) spanning several decades, plus new work by the meticulous, imaginative, and always fascinating Eric Stotik.