NEW YORK, NY- Stephen Haller Gallery presents an exhibition of new paintings by the renowned colorist Ron Ehrlich. With a rare level of skill and a complex methodology Ehrlich tackles his paintings with a contrasting muscularity and intellectual vigor. Ehrlich’s provocative and intense personality is evident in the vitality of his painting.

Best known as a pyrotechnical colorist wielding a blowtorch among other techniques, Ehrlich sees this new series of paintings as a natural evolution. He says he has always wanted to create a metaphor for freedom, and this series is an attempt to get rid of more constraints – to “blow off the edges of the work.” However he still uses the formality of a contrasting line at the top of the paintings satisfying the need for a sense of resolution.

Applying the paint in larger sweeping gestures, Ehrlich brings his work to another level in the process. Yet he is leaving nothing behind: there are areas like small windows in the work exposing the life of the painting: the drawing, mark making, images sensed
underneath. In this series he is also allowing more of the wood panel ground to show. This has the effect of giving the viewer a greater awareness of the actual depth of Ehrlich’s layering of paint, resulting in a nearly three dimensional quality to the work

A Promethean talent, Ehrlich engages in a frenzied dance with his work – ever reaching, ever searching, ever venturing. Ehrlich describes his work as “somatic” and says he is intensely aware of the visceral gesture and of his body size, his weight and how he uses it – literally putting his weight into the painting. In this new series Ehrlich is also experimenting with his palette and a new sense of color relationships.

Ehrlich is a passionate lover of poetry often using poems to fuel his creative energy. He once dedicated an exhibition to the work of poet Stanley Kunitz. In this series Yeats inspires Ehrlich as he explores the idea of equipoise that moment of balance, contrasting what has been called the “daemonic energy” of his own process and the meditative calm of its resolution in the painted work.