Sweetness on the Mountain

FIERMAN presents Sweetness on the Mountain, a solo exhibition of new and historic work by artist Eric Rhein. Rhein arrived in the East Village in 1980, and quickly became a part of the social and artistic fabric of that culturally-dynamic era. His diagnosis with HIV in 1987, and subsequent experience as a long-term survivor, continues to shape his artistic practice—which spans assemblage, sculpture, photography, and drawing. Rhein’s work hums with the metaphysical sensitivity of someone who has experienced the interstitial sapaces between life and death, as he deftly weaves personal and family history with the poetics of nature and the irrepressible joy and erotics of human connection.

Central to the exhibition and to Rhein’s practice is LEAVES, an AIDS memorial in the form of an ongoing series, begun in 1996, in which fallen leaf outlines, in hand-bent wire, memorialize individuals who died from AIDS-related causes. The masterly graphic quality of each wire leaf, more negative space than tangible heft, holds the spectral presence of a lost friend or lover—and the growing collection reflects the massive human cost of the epidemic. On view in this exhibition is Fly Leaves - Gathering of 71 --- a monumental composition of 71 poetically-ascribed, individual leaf-form homages which are framed together.

Also on view are Rhein’s framed assemblages—a long-running thread within his work. Incorporating his own photography, vintage male portraiture, and pages from medical and botanical texts, alongside jewelry, hardware, decorative objects, and personal relics—the assemblages acquire lushly romantic and deeply personal spiritual connotations. The talismanic quality of these works is both complicated and intensified by Rhein's photographic prints, in which objects are placed on bodies and then re-photographed. In Silver Horizon (self-portrait), Rhein presents a photograph of his own back marked by a constellation of freckles, and adorned by an arrangement of baroque jeweled ornaments. Both his three- dimensional compositions and re-photographed iterations call-to-mind curio cabinets, Medieval saintly reliquaries, and Victorian memento mori assemblages.
In addition to his photographic work, the exhibit presents Rhein's early wire and fabric sculptural constructions. As stand-ins for invisible bodies, and adornments for actual ones, the sculptures play with ideas of theatrical costuming and fashion and jewelry design. Autumn Sleeve serves as aesthetic armor: a cuff to cover one’s forearm with gold leather and metal embellishment.
When viewed collectively, Rhein’s four decades of work pulsate with the sublimity of one man’s experience of time’s endless march, suffused with an awareness of spiritual endurance. Through delicate gestures, intimate moments, and erotically-charged exchanges, Rhein continues to foreground his and a community's personal toll and triumph through the ongoing AIDS epidemic: the cost has been immense, but the beauty is both vast as the night sky, and tender as the petals of a single flower.