TR Ericsson: All My Love - A timeline of the artist's life and work as presented at Art Brussels 2024

At age 12, Ericsson’s grandfather enrolled him into an evening portrait painting class. In 1992 he earned a scholarship to attend the Cleveland Institute of Art. A year later Ericsson left Ohio and continued his art education at the Art Students League of New York. Throughout the 90s he earned a living painting commissioned portraits and won numerous prizes for figurative realist art but became increasingly aware of more experimental and conceptual approaches to art making. This led to a steady turn away from the conservative, figurative work he had been pursuing since his early teens.  

Many of these older paintings were stored away in the attic of his summer home in Painesville, Ohio, unseen and rarely thought of until the summer of 2021 when for the first time they were all hung together. What emerged was a kind of self-portrait and time capsule; a youth on the move, inspired, questioning, forging an identity. The early paintings are modestly scaled and explore a variety of styles and subject matter; portraits, figures, landscapes and still life, here and there an abstraction. Many were painted over or cut from larger works. Some were worked over laboriously. Others were made in a single sitting. As time trips over itself, the gesture of gathering these early works all together again is much more than a merely matured acknowledgment of how the past weaves into the present in unexpected ways. It accounts for the complexity of a sum when each part has its own value and has its own meaning. Meaning, which changes over time. These were shown together in 2022 as a singular, yet fragmented self portrait (of a decade) titled "Sad Young Man on a Train" in reference to  Marcel Duchamp's eponymous painting from 1911-12.

On the evening of June 8, 2003 Ericsson is told his mother had died suddenly and unexpectedly at her home in Ohio. Ericsson is divorced from his first wife and quits painting. This next decade was spent rebuilding his life and approach to art making by exploring print making and unusual forms of portraiture using materials like funerary ash, alcohol and nicotine. The materials are not clever or arbitrary, but link to each portrait in an urgent and authentic way. The nicotine haunts. The alcohol erases. The ashes are spread around the world to create a dispersed monument of filial love (preserved by many museums and private collections).

In 2021, a nicotine work titled “Bride” was selected as a finalist in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s competition, “American Portraiture Today” That same year, Ericsson showed Levey 107 oil paintings made between 1992 and 2002. He recontextualizes these older works as a singular yet fragmented self-portrait titled “Sad Young Man on a Train” and begins painting again. In 2022, the monumental self-portrait was shown in his third personal exhibition at Harlan Levey Projects alongside a 7-volume book work of his mother’s letters. Ericsson’s work and writing also feature in the publication “Amor Mundi: The Collection of Marguerite Steed Hoffman.” In 2023, he began his project “57 Years” in which he will paint one work for each year of his mother’s life.  The project will be completed in 2028 when he turns 57. The first finished paintings are shown at Art Brussels. Later in 2024, TBW Books will release “Nicotine” , the first publication dedicated to Ericsson’s haunting nicotine prints. Ericsson is also currently working on an ambitious Kunstlerroman, a sprawling novel using multiple literary and graphic forms.

Ericsson's work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, US), the Dallas Museum of Art (US), the Cleveland Museum of Art (US), the Everson Museum of Art (US), The Museum of Modern Art (New York, US) and many other prestigious public and private collections. His books and zines can be found in numerous library collections including the Yale University Arts Library (New Haven, US) and the Smithsonian Institution Libraries (Washington, US). His exhibitions have frequently been featured in prominent publications including The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Art Forum, Art in America, Hyperallergic and others. The artist has earned the following awards: The Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards Shortlist: Photography Catalog of the Year (2015) and Kraszna-Krausz Book Awards 2016 Best Photography Books Shortlist, the 91st International Print Center Award, Philadelphia, PA (2017) and in 2019 Ericsson was a finalist of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery's sixth triennial Outwin Boochever American Portrait Competition with his large scale nicotine work, Bride, a portrait of his mother.