Eric Aho at 527 Madison Avenue

527 Madison Avenue is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by Eric Aho in the Lobby Gallery from September 10–November 22, 2024. Located at 54th Street and Madison Avenue, an opening reception will be held on Thursday, September 19, from 5–7 PM, and the show is open to the public 9 AM – 5 PM, Monday through Friday. Presented in partnership with DC Moore Gallery, this will be the twenty-ninth exhibition in 527 Madison’s ongoing program showcasing noteworthy contemporary artists, organized by Jay Grimm Art Advisory.

Eric Aho is an American painter known for his immersive paintings of the natural world. With color and form that bridges the way we experience nature in totality, Aho’s canvases at every scale, occupy a zone of perception between sober realism and ecstatic abstraction. While Aho works from his own impressions and memories of the landscape, the artist also draws upon major pillars of art history—including De Kooning, Goya, Homer, and Constable—to define his compositions. He’s been called “One of the leading painters of landscape and the environment of his generation.”

Aho studied at the Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design in London, England and received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. In 1989, he participated in the first exchange of scholars in over thirty years between the U.S. and Cuba. He completed his graduate work at the Lahti Art Institute in Finland supported by a Fulbright Fellowship in 1991-92 and an American-Scandinavian Foundation grant in 1993.

His works have been exhibited and collected widely in the United States and abroad and can be found in the permanent collections of the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH; Denver Art Museum, CO; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Neuberger Museum of Art, SUNY Purchase; New Britain Museum of American Art, CT; and the Oulu Museum of Art, Finland among others. Eric Aho was elected National Academician of the National Academy Museum in 2009. He lives and works in Saxtons River, Vermont.

For inquiries about the work, please contact DC Moore Gallery at info@dcmooregallery.com. For more information about 527 Madison’s exhibitions, please contact Jay Grimm, who organizes the contemporary art program on behalf of 527 Madison at jgrimm@jaygrimm.com.

527 Madison Avenue is a boutique commercial office building located at the corner of 54th Street and Madison Avenue in New York City. Completed in 1986, it was designed by celebrated architectural firm FxCollaborative. The property has recently completed lobby and elevator upgrades and is owned by an affiliate of Mitsui Fudosan America, the US subsidiary of Japan's largest real estate company, Mitsui Fudosan Co., LTD. 

Shelley Heffler at 375 Hudson Street

375 Hudson is excited to announce a newly commissioned installation by Palm Springs-based artist Shelley Heffler in the lobby atrium through March 2025.

Heffler transforms discarded vinyl advertising banners into objects of visual beauty. Shelley’s painstaking process involves slicing these cast-off materials by hand, deliberately aiming the cuts to interrupt the printed images and make them unrecognizable. After sorting the resulting ribbons by the colors and shapes within them, the artist then weaves them into a new arrangement. An armature of hardware cloth provides structure and allows for undulation. These creations can be hung on the wall like traditional paintings or—as in the case of 375 Hudson—displayed as three-dimensional suspended sculptures. The lightweight constructions respond to movements of air and their shiny surfaces reflect light, enhancing the variation of colors.

Shelley’s practice addresses the impact of human consumption on the environment. The act of gathering stuff from the trash that was used briefly to promote a product or advertise an event and making art with it conveys a poignant and deeply relevant message. Obviously, taking a few choice pieces of detritus out of the waste stream will not solve the problem, but highlighting the fact that we routinely discard highly durable and often toxic materials may cause the viewer to think twice about society’s cycle of consumption. While this is a disturbing message, it is one delivered in a sincere and aesthetically pleasing manner. Shelley’s ability to harness the physical properties of her chosen medium, the lightness, and the sheen of the plastic fabric as well as their varied coloration impart not only a warning but also a sense of hope for the future.

Shelley Heffler grew up in New York City and studied at the Art Students League and the Fashion Institute of Technology. Shelley worked in New York in the interior design industry designing rugs before later relocating to Southern California. She then earned a BA and MFA from Cal State University, Northridge. Alongside her studio practice, Shelley built a twenty-five-year career as an arts educator. Shelley now lives and works in Palm Springs focusing on creating commissioned artwork for private and public collections.

This exhibition is presented with the cooperation of George Billis Gallery, New York, 212.645.2621. Please direct any inquiries about these works to gallery@georgebillisgallery.com.

All works: Taking Flight, 2023/2024, discarded vinyl banners and wire mesh, 42 x 42 inches (approximately), $3,600, each.

SoHyun Bae at 375 Hudson Street

375 Hudson Street is pleased to present 12 works by American painter SoHyun Bae on view in the lobby gallery through March 2025. Bae’s ethereal works straddle abstraction and representation, drawing upon influences from disparate sources such as Jewish mysticism, classical antiquity, and traditional Korean arts to convey a deep sense of spirituality. The artist has said that she seeks silence in her work, and that her practice “is about making a gesture, a secret sign on the surface of the canvas, opening up possibilities.”  One can see this idea in paintings such as So Wang Mo’s Garden, and Jasper Lake I and II, which mix focused passages that seem to describe fruits or rocks or water alongside more diffuse washes of color that suggest a vast pictorial space.  Bae evokes a sense of landscape in many of the other canvases on view, like in Sikussak and I Penitenti, where a horizon line set low along their bottom edges provides the setting for ethereal shards which read as rocky outcrops emerging from the ocean.

The process used by Bae is quite unusual. The artist shapes and tears pieces of rice paper which are incorporated into the surfaces of the paintings. Bae allows the paint to soak into the canvas, pouring and manipulating the viscous medium. The fragments of rice paper maintain their shape but wrinkle in response to the fluid paint and absorb it in a different way, creating texture, depth and variation of light, adding drama.  Bae works with highly concentrated pigments rather than standard oil or acrylic paints, generating an extraordinary intensity and luminosity of color.  The results, as seen in the displayed paintings which cover over a decade from Bae’s career, are at once transcendent and contemplative. 

SoHyun Bae holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, an MFA in from Boston University as well as a Masters of Theological Studies from Harvard University.  She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, as well as grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.  Please direct any inquiries about these works to  artinfo@sohyunbae.com

Paul Hunter at 100 Wall Street

New York-based artist Paul Hunter has two paintings from his Libretto series on view in the lobby of 100 Wall Street through August 2024.

Inspired by his daily drawing practice, these paintings are composed through a process of linear repetition––multiple layers of lines, each drawn and painted by hand onto shimmering gold and metal-leafed canvases. Etched into wet transparent paint, these lines allow the intensive glow and energy of the underlying gold and metal to reflect outwards through the paint. The slight variation between lines creates an undulating pattern giving them depth and a unique optical quality. Merging reading, writing, and painting, these works invite contemplative looking over time comparable to listening to a musical score––as Hunter says, "Music, like a walk through a landscape, unfolds over time, in a flow, with beginnings and ends, and crescendos and lulls, depending on what we notice, or where we started." 

Born in Paris to Canadian parents, Paul Hunter grew up in Quebec City, and earned an MFA at Concordia University in Montreal, before moving to New York City where he continues to work in his Harlem studio. Please direct any inquiries about these works to info@paulhunterart.com. The show is open to the public from 9 AM – 5 PM, Monday through Friday.