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ERIN CONE

Known for her bold visionary take on figurative realism, Erin Cone is recognized in the national art press as one of the top emerging artists in the country. After graduating with a B.F.A. in Painting from the University of Texas Austin in 1998, and working briefly in the design industry, Erin had her first gallery solo show at the age of 24 and has been painting full-time ever since. From the beginning, Erin’s paintings have captured a fusion of aesthetics all her own - combining the compositional strength of abstraction with the emotive power of magical realism to create something completely new.

“I emphasize visual impact over narrative context, focusing on the subtle orchestration of my subject within a framework of design. I create a deliberate push-and-pull between near-photorealistic detail and my own vocabulary of visual glitches that challenge that very realism. This duality is central to my work and allows the figures I paint to remain wholly representational while functioning abstractly - evoking emotion without defining it.”

Art critic, Geraldine Blum writes:
Graceful female figures displayed from the side, back, and front. Sometimes a woman’s tilted head is truncated; sometimes a shoulder disappears from the frame. The rich colors of the figures are muted by a drop of subdued background. Details are painstakingly added and yet have an abstract effect when seen as a whole.

Since her first solo exhibition in a gallery in 2001, the painter Erin Cone from Texas (b. 1976) has been a best kept secret among striving young artists. She has celebrated her success in many solo and group exhibitions in the USA and her work can be found in multiple collections around the world. Critics are fascinated by her unique new interpretations of traditional, figurative painting, and her subtle play with forms of realism. She experiments with dark-light contrasts, limited ranges of color, and the contradictions of true to life representation and graphic stylization.

The methods Erin Cone use to achieve this result are very complex. In seeking her motif, she makes sketches of poses, gestures, and details. These then become the basis for photographs (generally of herself, but sometimes of models as well). The final search for composition occurs intuitively. Through experimentation, Erin Cone finds the right combination of individual elements.

Once the composition has been determined, Cone otherwise continues very traditionally: sketches on the canvas, filled with layers of color, in some cases allowing for changes during the painting process. The result is such impressive pictures as Allure, the abstract-realist portrait/non-portrait of a young woman in a red dress: a formally elegant equilibrium of rigidity and tense movement; a successful mélange of abstract minimalism and figurative realism.