Eric Orr

Night Shift

1990

Eric Orr (1939–1998) was a sculptor and installation artist. He lived and worked in Venice, California from 1965–1998, and is a key figure of the Light and Space movement. Before moving to Los Angeles in 1965, Orr was a civil rights worker in Mississippi. His artworks are found in the collections of many major cultural institutions, and his work is installed in public and private spaces internationally. In both his installations, sculpture and paintings, Eric Orr worked with elemental qualities of natural materials, e.g. stone, metal, water, and fire, gold leaf, lead, blood, human skull, and AM/FM radio parts. Orr worked with the "phenomenological exploration of perception." His body of work also includes monochromatic paintings, and large scale fountains (with water & fire). His work was influenced by a religio-philosophical conceptualization of space icons found in ancient religions and cultures, such as Egyptian symbolism and Buddhist Spiritualism. Orr is associated with Light and Space, a group of mostly West Coast artists whose work is primarily concerned with perceptual experience stemming from the viewer's interaction with their work. "The space itself changes you, instead of an object." This group also includes, among others, artists James Turrell, Dewain Valentine, Peter Alexander, Robert Irwin, and Ron Cooper. "(Orr) always pursued a phenomenological exploration of perception, pushing retinal responses to the limit through ingenious installations or through paintings that blur space via complex relationships of color and gesture...mystical shaman, the alchemical philosopher, whose preoccupations with ritual and the properties of space-time and negative space have led to a body of work that is superficially benign and elegant, sucking the viewer in with Zen-like calm and innocence, yet simultaneously dark and fetishistic. His studies began at the University of Cincinnati and continued to the New School of Social Research, University of California at Berkeley, University of Mexico, New School For Social Research, Ecole de Paraphysiques-Paris. After "terminating" his formal education in 1965, Orr moved to Venice, CA and worked as Mark di Suvero's assistant. He began to develop "flat rectangular objects to hang on walls. Some of them are clearly sculptures; others combine the genre characteristics of sculpture and painting...(his wall objects) involved an attempt to combine artwork with the power of object by merging inner powers of materials with their outer visual properties." In 1981, he installed Silence and Ion Wind in the Hammer wing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 1982, Orr's installation Double Vision was part of Documenta 7. Silence and the Ion Wind "was a kind of architectural-iconic allegory of the alchemical process, as one walked from leaden wall to golden room, from darkenss to light, from speech to silence." Orr continued working on his wall objects, working with monochromatic color fields, working from both horizon, and void. Source: Wikipedia, 2019