Eric Capel

ERIC CAPEL (b. Toronto Canada December 14, 1948).

I categorize my work as Social Abstraction: abstract art with social or political influences immersed in the paint. I’m working on a collection of acrylic, collage, and graphite paintings on birchwood panels with the occasional diptych or work on paper, whose laborious surfaces are ghost images of emotional and political terrain.

Each work begins with lengths of twine stretched across the canvas at one-inch intervals, creating a linear grid. This grid is the foundation on top of which is built of images, graphic patterns, words, and phrases. The layers of which, are selectively hidden or left exposed. What remains is a pictorial record, a fossil, of their evolution.

What I have so laboriously constructed, I attack, tearing away the layers with power sanders, knives, and spray bottles. Revealing a strata of colors and embedded images, raw and exposed. The surface bears visual allusions to the works of abstract expressionism and street art, recontextualizing the polished traditions of high art with a grittier urban flair that is explosively contemporary. All reference to the twine guides, all that remains, are the horizontal scars of their absence.

“Hidden Depths” is a ...

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2020 MvVO Ad Art September 1st to 31st at the Oculus at One World Trade Center.

This unprecedented all-digital art show introduced millions of art lovers, novice & experienced collectors, art world professionals, tourists and the general public to the talented contemporary artists working in advertising and related fields. These artists are following in the footsteps of Warhol, Magritte, Toulouse-Lautrec, Keith Haring and many other famous names in art who either launched their careers while working in advertising or pursued dual careers for decades.

2019 MvVO Ad Art May 1-4 on LinkNYC and from May 1-31st at the Oculus at One World Trade Center.

What better place for a show of art made by people in advertising than on the streets of New York City, home to billboards and flashing signs galore? You know what they say: If your work can stand out here, it can stand out anywhere. A digital-only initiative during Frieze Week. Art by 100 artists who also work in advertising will be shown at 140 digital kiosks across Manhattan for four days this week and The Oculus, designed by world-renowned Architect, Santiago Calatrava, is one of the newest and most unusual civic spaces in New York Ci...