Eric Aho

Art Brokerage: Eric Aho American Artist: b. 1966. He was born in Melrose, Massachusetts and moved to New Hampshire with his family in 1974. His father worked for the Boston and Maine Railroad. He studied at the Central School of Art and Design in London, England, (1986–87) and received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 1988. In 1989 he participated in the first exchange of scholars in over thirty years between the U.S. and Cuba. He completed his graduate work at the Lahti Art Institute (now the Lahti University of Applied Sciences) in Finland supported by a Fulbright Scholarship in 1991-92 and an The American-Scandinavian Foundation grant in 1993. Aho's paintings are noted for the way they simultaneously convey the power and fragility of Nature. In an essay about Aho's painting, Donald Kuspit wrote: "He is a master of the natural sublime, but he realizes that intensely experienced nature becomes uncannily abstract, with no loss of concreteness. Aho puts the sublime back in nature, suggesting its abstract structure without denying its concrete fullness." He adds, "Aho regenerates abstraction by returning to its roots in the boundless generativity of nature, and with that gives us a fresh aesthetic consciousness of it." From 1989 to 1998 Aho taught painting at the Putney School in Putney, Vermont. Since 1998 Aho has held an adjunct position as visiting lecturer in the Graduate Light Design Program at the Theatre Academy of Finland in Helsinki, Finland and has taught at the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi, Finland. He has been a visiting artist and critic at the Burren College of Art in County Clare, Ireland; the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in County Mayo Ireland; the Weir Farm National Historic Trust in Connecticut; Colgate University in Hamilton, New York; the National College of Art in Oslo, Norway; the University of Art and Design in Helsinki, Finland; the St. Paul’s School, Concord, New Hampshire and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Aho’s exhibitions include the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine; the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, CT; the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College; the Ogunquit Museum of American Art; the McMullen Museum at Boston College; the Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Nagoya, Japan; the National Academy of Design and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City. The Oulu Museum of Art in Oulu, Finland and the Fleming Museum at the University of Vermont and The Currier Museum of Art have presented solo exhibitions. His paintings can be found in public collections throughout the country and abroad including the permanent collections of the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, the Springfield Art Museum, MO, the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Listings wanted.