Slashes of bright metal dance through space with the grace and charm of a teenage boy. “Arms” and “legs” akimbo, it is easy to forget that these simple lines and shapes are just that, hard edge geometries grounded in the rational sciences. Fertman has deployed these ciphers frequently over the past decade, always carved from wood. In his new body of work, their rawness is translated perversely to steel and fine metals. Perversity is Fertman’s stock in trade, trafficking always in the unexpected, whether it’s materials that misbehave or images that behave outside our expectations or just our imaginations. Not since Matt Mullican has a stick figure evoked such empathy, such humanity. Eric Fertman masters hard edge abstraction with an edge.
Eric Fertman was born in 1974 in Boston, MA. He received a BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art and Science and has exhibited nationally, with solo shows at Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, NC; The Kemper Museum in Kansas City, MO and in a two-person presentation at Time Equities, Inc., NYC for The Art-in-Buildings Program. Reviews of his work have appeared in Artforum, The New York Times and Sculpture Magazine among others.
