Winston Wächter Fine Art is pleased to present The Long Light, a new series of paintings by Eric Uhlir. In his second solo show with the gallery, Uhlir turns the lens onto himself, utilizing paint to create a body of work inspired by the effect that time has on places and the people who loved within them.
Uhlir’s compositions are created through layered mark-making of oil on linen, built up with brushes and then cut back with scrapers and solvents. Working fluidly between figuration and abstraction, each painting unfolds as environments rather than images, immersive fields where history and the present intermingle. Within the selection of works on view, large surfaces give space for both sweeping gestures and quiet, minute moments to breathe. The smaller works are intimate in scale and immediate in touch, carrying a negotiation between figure and field.
“I build the image up and take half of it back. This is my technique but also a reflection of how our memory works.”
Continuing his practice of referencing art historical narratives, Uhlir is now incorporating the examination of his own history and experiences in his work. This newest body of work comes out of a specific period of loss and domestic change. The titles of each work, such as The warm and the cold and Once a favorite tree, reflect that landscape and marriage, weather and memory, are the same subject at different temperatures. Each image accrues and erodes the same way that memory does.
Eric Uhlir has spent two decades building paintings that balance on the threshold of reference and the act of looking. In The Long Light, Uhlir captures a moment in each piece where a body, a room, or a memory assembles itself out of paint, focusing in on the light that a life accumulates and the forms it releases.
Eric Uhlir (American, b. 1979) grew up in Southern California and earned his BFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2003. He had a solo exhibition with Winston Wachter, NY in 2024 and has exhibited at IA&A at Hillyer in Washington, DC, and with Caitlin Berry Fine Art at Culture House, among others. Recent commissions include SoHo House West Hollywood and Deloitte Consulting in Washington, DC. His work is held in private collections internationally. Uhlir maintains a studio in Los Angeles, CA.
