Deconstructing and Reconstructing Clothing

New York based artist Eric M. Macks work is all about engaging materials, top down, including their texture as well as their stories, and the harmonic arrangement of fragments from sometimes very diverse origins.

„My practice is inclined towards the radical. The critical point has to do with complacent norms that separate life from art.“ Eric Nathaniel Mack says about his works.

The 28 year old painter, sculpturer and installation artist engages in his works different kinds of fabric he vividly paints over, ripps, arranges. Among them are not only carfeully collected materials like moving blankets or a hand made quilt from the fities, but also items charged with personal value such as old clothes of the artist himself or fabric from a family sofa – set. Materials as varied as exquisite silk, shipping blankets and a lot of found materials get a semmingly rough treetment with colour and brushstroke in Mack’s now Bronx based studio and are always, than, arranged somehow in the room, making space and architecture a third media of expression.

What emerges from that is a very sensual, vivid art, one that suggests not only a story but an imtimacy that communicates rather via association than in a narrative form, an expressive power hard to grasp or define that nevertheless breathes through the works.

For his piece „Honey Hollow“, for instance, Mack arranged a moving blanket treated with acrylic colour in front of an electric fan. That way, it delicatedly touches the wall behind it in an incessant rhythm, evoking associations of a human breath moving the fabric.

Mack is clearly interested in a consolidation of fashion and arts and got in touch with the aethetics and metaphorical language of fashion as well as it’s texture and the material behind the phenomena, as he grew up helping out his father in a movable bootleg fashion store.

Mack just finished a one year work residency in the studio museum of Harlem and was named one of the top fifteen emerging artists of 2015 by artsy magazine.

We are looking forward with excitment to see his current works soon in NYC and Istanbul.-