Paintings by Eric Aho
Organized by the Currier Museum of Art
June 2, 2012 – September 9, 2012

This summer the Currier Museum of Art will be the first American museum to present a survey exhibition of New England landscape painter Eric Aho (born 1966.) With more than 30 major paintings, the exhibition follows Aho on his artistic journey from dramatic images of the New England landscape to energetic, freely brushed abstract compositions inspired by his responses to nature.

Aho grew up in Hudson, NH and now lives just across the border in Saxtons River, Vermont. In the tradition of English painters like John Constable and the French Impressionists, Aho began sketching and painting out of doors using New England’s mountain vistas and rural valleys as his subjects. His early paintings capture dramatic effects of weather and sunlight in a muted pallet, while his more recent paintings are monumental in scale and employ bold colors. Aho will lead a Master Class at the Currier Art Center (June 9-10), which will be a two-day intensive studio class for professional and vocational artists looking to advance their skills.

Image credit: Eric Aho, Winter Cathedral, 2006, oil on linen. © Eric Aho

Cristi Rinklin (project title TBD)
Organized by the Currier Museum of Art
June 9, 2012 – September 9, 2012
 
This summer, Boston-based painter Cristi Rinklin expands upon historic traditions of stained glass and scenic wallpaper to turn the Currier’s Putnam Gallery into an imaginary landscape of dazzling color and light.
 
Made expressly for the Currier, this environmental installation will feature hand-painted images of regional geography manipulated in the computer and printed on transparent panels and installed over a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. Light will stream through the panels and immerse visitors in a fictional world of brightly colored and stylized waterfall, cloud and mountain forms. Adjacent walls hand-painted in motifs from historic wallpaper designs continue the effect of an imaginary landscape beyond the architecture. 
 
Rinklin’s installation builds upon her recent body of work that reconsiders nineteenth-century American society’s predilection for paintings of sublime vistas and accentuated views of nature. Paintings in the Currier’s collection including Albert Bierstadt's Moat Mountain, Intervale, NH (1862) and Jasper Francis Cropsey's An Indian Summer Morning in the White Mountains (1857) are examples that inspired Rinklin’s project here. The resulting fragmented collage with artificial colors and shifts in scale visualizes a new pictorial model and desired way to consume images of the American landscape informed by our contemporary technology and screen-based culture of the Internet, televisions, computers and mobile devices.
 
Rinklin exhibits nationally and has received numerous awards, including a 2010 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship for Drawing. She earned an MFA from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis and is Associate Professor of Studio Art at College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA. Her installation continues the Currier’s commitment to highlight early- and mid-career artists from the region and offer museum visitors experiences that expand traditional notions of art making.
 
This exhibition is sponsored by Laconia Savings Bank and supported by the Gloria Wilcher Exhibition Fund and a research and publication grant from the College of the Holy Cross. Additional support provided by ICL Imaging.

^{Image: Cristi Rinklin, digital mock-up for Putnam Gallery windows installation. Cristi Rinklin is represented by Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston.}