“Plunge boldly into the thick of life, and seize it where you will…” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German writer and polymath, 1749–1832
Ice Cut (Violet Kennebec) is part of a yearslong series of paintings depicting Eric Aho’s hand-cut portals through thick ice into frigid water. Aho, who lives and works on the border of New Hampshire and Vermont, built a traditional Finnish sauna by a pond near his studio. Every winter for the past 15 years, he has sawn through the ice to create an avanto – Finnish for “hole in the ice.” Throughout winter, this square eye blinks back a reflection of the day: the weather, the atmosphere, the texture of snow hitting the surface. He sees an inherent gravitas in this simple and austere form year after year.
Aho grew up hearing stories shared by his father, the child of Finnish immigrants, who worked as an ice harvester in New England during the Great Depression. The large, to-scale ice cut paintings braid together Aho’s familial history, his own childhood memories, and the collective cultural history of the ice-harvesting industry into the immediacy of his seasonal practice of sawing through the ice and plunging into cold water.
The black void of Ice Cut (Violet Kennebec) is a powerful, albeit daunting, invitation to brave the unknown.
Aho says of his art, “It’s not about making something; it is about letting something arrive.”
Eric Aho’s work is included in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts; Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Buffalo, New York; Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine; Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, New Hampshire; New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Connecticut; and Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire. He may be reached through his gallery, DC Moore, 535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY.