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.
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