Transcending Nature: 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

Contemporary Connections
Cristi Rinklin: Diluvial
Organized by the Currier Museum of Art
June 9, 2012 – September 9, 2012

This summer, museum visitors will be absorbed in an imaginary landscape of dazzling color and light when they enter Cristi Rinklin’s new immersive installation created specifically for the Currier. The museum’s collection and a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows in the Putnam Gallery inspired this project, which re-interprets the drama of nineteenth-century sublime landscape paintings through a contemporary lens.

Billowing cloud and meandering waterfall forms in blues, greens and purples wrap across the gallery’s large expanse of windows and nearby walls, surrounding visitors in an awesome spectacle of nature’s destructive forces.  Light will pour through the windows, and much like stained glass, will project colored imagery into the gallery. Nearby walls – completely covered in patterns that evoke historic wallpaper – continue the immersive effect and function like analog modes of virtual space to transport visitors to a world beyond the confines of the architecture. 

Rinklin titled her installation “Diluvial” in reference to cycles of creation and ruin and the Great Biblical Flood, which many people through the mid-1800s believed shaped the American landscape and imbued it with spiritual significance. Francis Cropsey’s 1857 painting  An Indian Summer Morning in the White Mountains  melds beauty with foreboding and exemplifies the type of awe-inspiring images that inspired Rinklin’s project.  Through a combination of hand-painting and digital techniques, Rinklin creates a different pictorial model based on contemporary graphical and technology-generated views of nature.

Rinklin’s preliminary sketches and studies for Diluvial will be on view in the museum’s Discovery Gallery. Visitors will be able to see the artist’s hand-worked paintings that she scanned and combined in the computer to create the window screen composition and learn more about her inspiration from historic artworks.

The Contemporary Connections series features new work by early- and mid-career artists from New England made in direct response to the Currier’s collection and architecture. These projects offer visitors expanded perspectives on contemporary art making and invite them to experience dynamic linkages between past and present art practices and cultural history.

Rinklin is Associate Professor of Drawing and Painting at College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA. She exhibits internationally and has received numerous awards, including a 2010 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship for Drawing. She is represented by Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston.

This exhibition is sponsored by Laconia Savings Bank and supported by the Gloria Wilcher Exhibition Fund and a research and publication grant from 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.}

Printmaking in the Age of Rembrandt
Organized by the Currier Museum of Art
September 29, 2012 - January 6, 2013

Printmaking in the Age of Rembrandt will feature around 100 prints and etchings by more than a dozen artists including Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) and his contemporaries  Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617) and Jan Dirkszoon Both (1618-1652). Goltzius had a profound influence on Rembrandt, the artist known as the towering genius of Western art, a master of light and shadow whose 17th-century Dutch paintings, drawings and prints have placed him among the greatest creative talents of all time. Goltzius’ prints are respected for their ingenious storytelling, technical mastery and inventive figural compositions such as his rendering of a model military officer in The Captain of the Infantry. His ten prints depicting the Passion of Christ are a high watermark of visual story telling.

Historically, prints are important because their relative affordability provided the middle class with an opportunity to acquire fine works of art, while also providing working artists with an avenue of steady income. Prints are more easily transported than framed paintings, which helped transmit revolutionary artistic ideas from one country to another.

This special exhibition is supported by People’s United Bank and Shaheen & Gordon, P.A.

^{Image: Hendrick Goltzius, The Captain of the Infantry, 1587, Museum Purchase: The Henry Melville Fuller Acquisition Fund, 2010.26.7; Harmensz van Rijn Rembrandt, The Death of the Virgin, 1639,Museum Purchase: The Henry Melville Fuller Acquisition Fund, 2010.26.19}

COMMUNITY GALLERY EXHIBITION
New Threads: An American Quilt Story
May 19-July 9, 2012

Join us to celebrate the Currier's two-year long outreach initiative with Rubia Inc.'s Sewing Confidence class, a program where women from new immigrant and refugee families from Burundi, Rwanda and the Congo receive education and resources to foster sustainable business endeavors. The exhibition will feature artwork made of African fabrics, in addition to a collaborative project that tells the story of the women's journey from the difficulties of their own countries to the challenges and successes of their new lives in America. The reception on Saturday, May 19 (from 11 am-2 pm in the museum's Community Gallery) will feature African dance and music, food and art activity for children and adults.