Hank Ehrenfried

Region: Northeast

Website: https://www.hankehrenfried.com/

City / State: Brooklyn, NY

 I paint from collages composed of my own studio ephemera that are cut and folded, pasted back together, then finally pinned to the walls. Through painting the scenes that emerge, I pay homage to these impromptu materials and to the time during which they became significant for, and yet despite their ephemerality. The results are painted archives that work to preserve moments in time while acknowledging the necessity of history passing. By announcing this project, however, the paintings spell out their inevitable failure; just as the collages they depict reveal a contingent significance of their assembled components, the paintings themselves convey the duplicity of their representation through trompe l’oeil effects. This tension becomes the ultimate theme of my work. Taking inspiration from Cubist painters, I supplement their planar experiments by attending to the radical potential of folds and edges—sites where a viewer begins to wonder what in the collage and what in the painting is visible or disappeared, fixed or moveable.