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Erik SAXON

Erik SAXON

Untitled

1975

acrylic on canvas
36 x 36"

Summary

For the past four decades, Erik Saxon has produced rigorous abstract geometric work, including paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture. Born and raised in San Francisco, California, Saxon moved to New York in 1964, but returned to San Francisco in 1965 to earn his Masters degree. He permanently relocated to New York City in 1968. Between 1968-1973, he produced works that alternated between abstraction and abstract figuration. In 1973, he began exclusively making abstract work based on the grid format, initially using watercolor on paper and then industrial paint on raw canvas.

In the past thirty years, Saxon has experimented broadly with the concept of the monochrome. He has worked with a wide variety of shaped painting supports, including squares, rectangles, crosses, circles, and ovals. He has produced single panel paintings, as well as diptychs and triptychs. His paintings commonly featured layered surfaces sometimes involving up to thirty successive layers of paint, which according to the artist, “frees the paint from its support enabling it to become an independent surface.”

Erik is most closely associated with the Radical Painting Group active in NYC during the 1970s and early 1980s. The group stressed a radical return to the core concerns of painting. The group’s other participants included artists Marcia Hafif, Dale Henry, Anders Knutsson, Joseph Marioni, Olivier Mosset, Phil Sims, Doug Sanderson, Susanna Tanger, Frederic Matys Thursz, Merrill Wagner, and Jerry Zeniuk, among others.

Erik Saxon (b. 1941) has exhibited his work internationally in galleries museums including Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, Serbia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States.