Our first presentation at Arco Madrid was in 2020. Weeks later the fair site had been transformed into an emergency hospital. Returning in 2022, our second presentation will focus on a body of work by TR Ericsson that deals with grief, memory and existential questions related to fundamental experiences of living, loving, losing and moving forward as the world turns.
For the past 20 years, TR Ericsson has expanded on an investigation and reinterpretation of a deteriorating archive of family artifacts, documents, writings, and photographs. His ongoing project 'Crackle & Drag', makes a personal struggle public, coming to terms with the archive’s power to determine the past and the future, even as it vanishes in time. Many works in this project are made with unusual materials including nicotine, alcohol and funerary ash. Ericsson’s nicotine portraits were recently recognized by the Smithsonian Museum as a finalist in The National Portrait Gallery's triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. His ash works appear in numerous private and public collections as, according to the artist “I am in the process of not only spreading my mother’s ashes into private and institutional frameworks but more importantly spreading her life story. She was uniquely able to receive others, to listen and provide comfort in the harshest and most difficult moments of personal pain. I consider every work I’ve made about her, or of her, as a symbol of her love, devotion and selflessness. Lessons our world desperately needs.” At ARCO Madrid 2022, we present a selection of works in various scales and materials including text based works, nicotine portraits, cocktail paintings, ash prints and objects.