Echo Eggebrecht: Probably Science

The gallery is pleased to announce Probably Science - the second solo exhibition by New York-based painter Echo Eggebrecht. The exhibition will feature twenty intimately scaled paintings of interior scenes.

The spaces within Eggebrecht’s paintings feel both strange and familiar. They remain persistently elusive. Devoid of human inhabitants, the objects within are charged with an unsettling emotional resonance, akin to deja vu. There is a sense of timelessness. What is this space? Is this imagined from a well-worn book, a set from a film, or place visited in a dream?

Eggebrecht’s sincere attention to detail is egalitarian; all objects within each room are treated with the same precision and care. Bringing to mind Gaston Bauchelard’s “The Poetics of Space”, Pierre Bonnard’s domestic spaces full of the play of pattern on pattern, institutional period display rooms, and Shaker furniture—the paintings are both folksy and earnest. Color is paramount in Eggebrecht’s paintings. Age-worn colors mingle with fresh bright ones. There is something subconscious about the way she uses color—these are colors the way we remember them, not the way we see them in the world.

“Aesthetically, [Eggebrecht] remains committed to the tradition of still life, at the very crossroads between modernist experimentation and traditional landscape painting. They are sites of human activity without the humans—instead just the remains of their rituals, their signifiers, their portents. Like Phillip Guston’s ghostly still-lives, the macabre emptiness of her paintings is the logical outcome of the objects’ supreme relational importance.” – Reva Blau, “The Still Life of Human Experience: Eggebrecht Explores Love, Loss & Time Through Objects’ Spatial Relationships”, Provincetown Banner, March 29, 2007.

"Viewing the works here is like stepping into a theatrical experiment at its midpoint, or being dropped into someone else’s inevitably complex dream. If that sounds unpleasant, Eggebrecht might change your mind. Intensely personal and still somehow inviting, the paintings are among the boldest works currently on display in New York." - Doug McClemont, "Doug McClemont’s Top 10 Shows In New York: October 2010," Saatchi Online Magazine, September 28, 2010. 

Echo Eggebrecht (b. 1977, Bangor, ME) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received a MFA from Hunter College and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has had residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE. Her work has been included in solo exhibitions at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York and Ter Caemer Meert Contemporary, Kortijk, Belgium. She has been included in group exhibitions at Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn; Ulrich Museum, Wichita, KS; and Monya Rowe Gallery, New York; among others. Probably Science is the artist's second solo show with Horton Gallery.