MARFA — RULE Gallery is currently presenting Eric Blum: Paintings. This solo exhibition marks the artist’s third with the gallery and first in its Marfa location at 204 E San Antonio St. The gallery is open Wednesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Eric Blum’s paintings invite viewers into the margins of perception — those liminal spaces where the boundaries of form and amorphousness blur. Developed through delicate layers of ink-drenched silk and beeswax, Blum’s compositions hover between the tangible and the ephemeral, the actual and the perceived.
His expansive palette ranges across each painting, offering shades of lush green, plum brown, and ice cream pink — building atmospheres that resist immediate recognition, rewarding slow and contemplative engagement. Blum’s artistic process is a balance of intention and intuition, guided by chance and transformation. Initial drawings serve as the foundation for his works, but through a series of flips, rotations and excisions, the original forms are often fragmented or entirely transformed.
These layered “misunderstandings,” as Blum calls them, result in dreamlike anagrams of his initial ideas — each painting a visual puzzle that lingers like the fading remnants of a memory.
Eric Blum was born and raised in California and now lives and works in New York. He has been represented by RULE Gallery in Denver since the 1990s, debuting with a solo exhibition in 1998. Blum’s work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions across the U.S. and internationally, with notable shows in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, Santa Fe, Denver, Madrid and Paris.