“The main thing wrong with painting is that it is a rectangular plane placed flat against the wall. A rectangle is a shape itself; it is obviously the whole shape; it determines and limits the arrangement of whatever is on or inside of it.”

Donald Judd, Arts yearbook, 8, New York, 1965

Depending on who you asked in the 1960s and early 1970s, the art of painting was either washed up or waiting for a close-up. Painting’s only limiting factor then was the imagination of the artist, or an artist/critic-like sculptor Donald Judd, for whom painting in the traditional sense had become a dead end. On the other hand, with painting dead, the sky is/was the limit and painting could be whatever an artist wanted it to be.

Through the series of 11 recent works that comprise Steve Erickson: Painter, one can witness firsthand the artists’s desire to create paintings that suggest vast possibilities well beyond the edge of a rectangular plane. At once mysterious and familiar, Erickson’s work will provide Figge visitors an opportunity to appreciate the possibilities of painting in the 21st Century.