Pushing the boundaries of painting and object, of art and fashion, Eric N. Mack uses fabric, worn clothes, dye, blankets, paint, bleach, magazine cut-outs and photographs to create three-dimensional tactile assemblages in which colour, form, texture and line become both intimate and culturally significant.

Mack refers to himself as painter but his work pushes far beyond any singular frame. At the centre of the work are linens, cottons, polyester, lace, each with its own production process and cultural markers.  Hue and tonality are introduced by layers of specific colours taken from seasonal high end fashion as well as discount-store fabrics. Fashion offers an access point; a single piece is an outfit, an installation is a closet, and a collage is the descendant of a mood board. Textiles are a primary medium and environments its support.

Mack builds artworks that bring forward personal associations and recollections, from fabric colours to textures as vehicles of light, from opacity to translucency, and as vehicles of form through grids, gestures, weaves, drips, spreads. The drip of coffee on a shirt connecting to an expanded history of painting. Mack also includes what he calls “everyday fragments,” images sourced from newspapers, magazines, ephemera from being in the world alongside personal drawings or lists. In addition, Mack, also incorporates objects that are often unseen, such as moving blankets, or those which catch our eye, handmade tailored shirts. His constructions stretch across any given space, supported with unconventional structures from umbrellas to commanding flagpoles, and tethered to gallery walls. As he states “There are a lot of things in our everyday that are structured to not be noticeable that I think are things that speak about life.”(i) It is here that the title comes to the fore, Scampolo!, the Italian word for remnant, brings forth what is there and what is not, and what is leftover enduring.

Human scale is integral to the work’s relationship to any space. In Gallery 1 Scampolo! (2022) stretches from handrails to gallery walls calling the viewer into the physical space. Locally procured pieces of linen, produced by one of the last remaining linen makers in Ireland,(Emblem Weavers) are sewed together with polyesters and fabrics from elsewhere, creating a connection between the local and the universal. It is here that the Italian word for factory, fabric, comes to mind and textile’s longstanding relationships with production, and with the hand and body. While photographs taken from fashion catwalks, from a variety of magazines including The Face, and some produced through Mack’s ongoing collaboration with stylist Haley Wollens and designer Kiko Kostadinov, are enlarged and dispersed across the space connecting us with other spaces. Mack explores “how the art object, at its most sacred, should reflect altered systems of value, especially in observation of the world’s brutalities”(ii) and “imagines the case for the painting object to leave its autonomous support structures to need the body.”(iii)

Mack pushes the boundaries of painting and sculpture, of art and fashion, collapsing hierarchies and questioning value, inviting the viewer to physically move through forms of abstraction, through connection and personal ties, and gestures to new possibilities of exchange between artwork and environment, body and space

(i) Long, Monique. 2022. “Eric N. Mack reconsiders the dimensions of visual art”. Document Journal Online, 28 January 2022.

(ii) “Altered Systems of Value: Eric N. Mack”. Eric N. Mack in conversation with Viola Angiolini, Mousse Magazine, No. 70, February 2020.

(iii) Ibid.

Eric N. Mack (b. 1987, Columbia, MD) received his BFA from The Cooper Union, New York, NY and his MFA from Yale University, New Haven, CT. His work has been shown extensively internationally and has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, FL (2021); Scrap Metal Gallery, Toronto, Canada (2019); The Power Station, Dallas, TX (2019); Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY (2019); Simon Lee Gallery, London, UK (2018); BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK (2017); Albright–Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2017). Recent major group exhibitions include Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2019); Desert X, Coachella Valley, CA (2019); and Serpentine Gallery, London, UK (2019). Mack has recently completed a  residency at the American Academy in Rome, having been awarded the Philip Guston Rome Prize in 2021. He was the recipient of the inaugural BALTIC Artists’ Award (2017) and completed artist residencies at the Rauschenberg Residency, Captiva Island, FL and Delfina Foundation, London, UK. He has collaborated with designers Kiko Kostadinov and Grace Wales Bonner along with stylist Haley Wollens and lives and works in New York.

Interview |“Eric N. Mack reconsiders the dimensions of visual art”  by Monique Long, Document Journal Online, 28 January 2022.

Interview | “Altered Systems of Value: Eric N. Mack”. Eric N. Mack in conversation with Viola Angiolini, Mousse Magazine, No. 70, February 2020.

Interview | “Eric N. Mack in conversation with Jessica Gatlin“, The Phillips Collections: Conversations with Artists, May 2021.

Interview |“Eric N. Mack, the New York artist who paints with textiles” by Mahfuz Sultan, Pin-Up, 26, Spring Summer 2019.

Review | “Eric N. Mack at The Douglas Hyde Gallery of Contemporary Art”, by Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, Artforum, April 2022.

Feature | “An Artist Makes a Room His Canvas, and Swathes of Fabric His Paint”, by Claudia Dalby, Dublin Inquirer, 13 April 2022.

We would like to thank the Irish Museum of Modern Art for their production residency and Janice Hough, Assistant Curator: Residency and Artists’ Programmes at IMMA for their support in the realisation of new work by Eric N. Mack in Dublin.