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MICHAEL EADE

 

Composed of countless images and icons borrowed from classical texts, religious scriptures and various histories of art, nature and cultures, the work of New York-based artist Michael Eade is dense with meaning. However, the core importance of his art is not the challenge of decoding its symbols in their infinite combinations; it is the spectrum of individual viewers' unique, intuitive responses to these colorful, jumbled scenes of imagined botanicals and societies. After all, it is an intuitive mind that is behind the brush: as Eade explains, "My work is not political or philosophical. It is personal. My work invites viewers to embark on visual tours of an unknown yet familiar looking world aimed at becoming a part of their cultural and emotional consciousness."

 

Best known as a painter of lush, fanciful landscapes, Eade encompasses many media in his art practice, often combining elements of painting, sculpture and installation to expand the visual as well as visceral effects of his conjured worlds. For his mixed-media Hermes windows commission, in keeping with the 2005 theme of Hermes, Eade again turns to a trope that runs through many great landscapes and histories: the river. The inspiration, and title, for Eade's windows at Hermes is a Peter Paul Rubens painting called The Four Rivers Of Paradise (c.1615), which only recently acquired this name, having been known previously as The Four Continents.

The revision of this great work's title lodged in Eade's mind when he visited the painting last winter in Vienna. Rather than continue to attribute each of the four sets of figures in the painting as symbols standing for the four continents that were known in the 17th Century: Africa, America, Asia and Europe; historians now assert that these four pairs correspond to the four rivers that birthed civilization: the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Ganges and the Nile. For his windows at Hermes, Eade draws on the iconic and metaphoric powers of these rivers to render them in his signature style, invigorated by this shift in scholarship that finally emphasizes the form- and life-giving qualities of these bodies of water over the tracts of earth they divide and nourish.

Eade has exhibited widely throughout New York and the United States, often through prestigious public- and community-oriented organizations such as the Aljira Contemporary Art Center in Newark, NJ; Wave Hill in the Bronx, NY; and the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Eade was recently selected as a short listed finalist by MTA Arts for Transit to design mosaics for the City's Times Square Station.

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ARTIST'S WINDOWS AT HERMES... , HOLIDAYS 2005