Eric Rhein AIDS-Vitality-Creation: an artist?s journey
Samstag, 30. Juli 2016 - 12:00 Uhr
Galerie Schleifmühlgasse 12-14
AIDS-Vitality-Creation: an artist?s journey
New York artist Eric Rhein shares his creative voyage, influences, vulnerabilities, and discoveries, through three decades of living with HIV. The themes of resilience, spirit, survival, and transcendence will be explored. Central in Rhein?s work is Leaves, an ongoing project started in 1996: a series of symbolic portraits honoring the lives of over 250 men and women he knew who died of complications from AIDS, whose lives still enrich his being and work.
Eric?s talk will feature work created over the last 30 years, depicting his travels to physical and mystic spaces. Often using cast-off objects, arranged with care and balance, he charges them with new meaning and life, mirroring the artist?s survival and renewal.
Works from Rhein?s Leaves series are currently on view at the residence of the US Ambassador to the OSCE, Daniel B. Baer; and his work has been exhibited or added to the permanent collections of U.S. embassies in Cameroon and Malta.
Rhein received his degree from the School of Visual Arts, NYC. His work is exhibited internationally, including at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Pera Museum, Istanbul; the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, NYC; the Portland Museum of Art, Oregon; the Johnson & Johnson World Headquarters, and the Smithsonian?s exhibition Millennium Messages. He has received grants and fellowships from the Pollock/Krasner Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony. His work is featured in the 2015-2016 traveling exhibition Art AIDS America, currently at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.