Peter Blum Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Erik Lindman entitled Helian at 176 Grand Street, New York. This will be Lindman’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, and will be the first time his paintings, sculptures, and works on paper will be presented together. There will be an opening reception on Friday, November 17 from 6-8pm.

Lindman's artistic practice is defined by his innovative use of found materials such as shards of steel or canvas webbing as central elements in his paintings, allowing the built-up surface to direct the development of the work. The central forms—often avian or humanoid in appearance—emerge from monochromatic fields, creating a dynamic interplay between figure and ground. Never simply placed onto the canvas, these forms are synergistically integrated into the composition, with each shape and contour carefully considered while the thick layers of paint, bodied with shredded rubber and ground glass, add texture and depth to the painting’s topographical surface.

In addition to his paintings, Lindman explores his fascination with materials and form through sculpture and work on paper. His sculptures investigate a sequential series of viewpoints, each dissimilar and separate from the next, providing a three-dimensional counterpart to the layered surfaces of his paintings. Similarly, his works on paper—often drawings of negative space between things that he encounters such as clouds or leaves—serve as an extension of his painting practice where he experiments with light and composition in a more improvisatory manner. In total, Lindman’s open-ended oeuvre invites viewers to both question and reaffirm the distinct possibilities of abstraction for his own generation.

"This body of work is dedicated to the early twentieth-century Austrian poet Georg Trakl, from whose poem by the same name I've taken my title. Much like my previous work dedicated to the Norwegian painter Peder Balke, my work is not illustrative nor a stylistic homage. My paintings mirror a tone, a quality of spacial silence and visual materiality, that I invoke from the work of these artists."

—Erik Lindman

"His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” 

—Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1969: 249.

Erik Lindman (b. 1985, New York) lives and works in New York. He earned his BA from Columbia University in 2007 and received a Yale Norfolk Painting Fellowship in 2006. Lindman was honored at the Hirshhorn Museum’s Artist x Artist Gala in 2019. He has also received The Louis Sudler Prize for Excellence in the Arts from Columbia University in 2007, as well as an Ellen B. Stoeckel Fellowship for Yale Norfolk School of Art in 2006. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Kunsthalle FriArt Fribourg in Freiburg, Switzerland, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, White Columns in New York, le 109 in Nice, France, Kaviar Factory in Henningsvær, Norway, and Foundation Hippocrène in Paris among others.