New Breed Bay, 2017

Erik Parker   Emerging artists

Born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1968, Erik Parker lives and works in New York. Erik Parker is a self-appointed archivist of postwar New York Art, with an interest extending to music and performance. His paintings, which resemble drawings, are mostly made up of words: elaborate litanies of name, of people, of places and movements both familiar and famous, that evoke an era or a scene.

Parker paints organisation charts, maps, thorough lists of famous artists around the world, curators, gallery owners, artists, musicians, poets, drug dealers, pimps and famous people that animated the second half of the previous century. The various names are individually enclosed in a cocoon that, seen as a group creates a type of link rich in detail, an original plot in which an expressive strenght extends beyond the work of art, deliberately using “naif" false style.

In his paintings, each element is linked to another, or descends from another, his works are similar to some amusing family trees. Already sanctioned in the pages of the New York Times as one of the most interesting young New York artists, Erik Parker has created for this exhibition 5 oils on canvas of large dimensions and a series of drawings.