Erik Vestville was born in postwar Brno in Czechoslovakia, a city for the most part spared by German and later Allied bombing. The early esthetic underpinnings of his art can be found in the fledgling Bauhaus and International architectural styles left undisturbed and beckoning. Sketches and drawings he made in early childhood led to his building models of these houses.
After earning a degree in aeronautical engineering and working as an interpreter at the International Trade Fair in Brno, he defected via Germany to the United States, where he turned his attention to medicine at the University of Houston. Dissatisfied, he returned to aviation and designing features of the AG-250 Aries for Anderson/Greenwood.
All his free time was spent in artistic pursuits. Work he did with Japanese sculptor Masaru Takiguchi, and lessons with painter Cal Wilson led to a slew of large canvases in abstract expressionism, late renaissance genre surrealistic self-referential explorations of alchemistic themes and pictorial simultaneity. He never considered another profession.
After obtaining American citizenship he took his Nikon to Europe, North Africa, and Middle East for two years. The common thread in the myriad images he brought back was his unerring sense of design, which later found expression in constructivist relief work made of machined metal, sandblasted glass, or carved museum board and wood, inspired in part by British artist Ben Nicholson and the Russian constructivists/suprematists such as Vladimir Tatlin and Kazimir Malevich.
The investigation in these recent pieces centers on the brain’s insistence to serially complete complex curvilinear forms even though their expression is intentionally interrupted or denied. The interplay of these meticulously laid-out contours at different layers makes for a self-refreshing visual fugue whose shadow-play can be infinitely varied by manipulating the light source.
After earning a degree in aeronautical engineering and working as an interpreter at the International Trade Fair in Brno, he defected via Germany to the United States, where he turned his attention to medicine at the University of Houston. Dissatisfied, he returned to aviation and designing features of the AG-250 Aries for Anderson/Greenwood.
All his free time was spent in artistic pursuits. Work he did with Japanese sculptor Masaru Takiguchi, and lessons with painter Cal Wilson led to a slew of large canvases in abstract expressionism, late renaissance genre surrealistic self-referential explorations of alchemistic themes and pictorial simultaneity. He never considered another profession.
After obtaining American citizenship he took his Nikon to Europe, North Africa, and Middle East for two years. The common thread in the myriad images he brought back was his unerring sense of design, which later found expression in constructivist relief work made of machined metal, sandblasted glass, or carved museum board and wood, inspired in part by British artist Ben Nicholson and the Russian constructivists/suprematists such as Vladimir Tatlin and Kazimir Malevich.
The investigation in these recent pieces centers on the brain’s insistence to serially complete complex curvilinear forms even though their expression is intentionally interrupted or denied. The interplay of these meticulously laid-out contours at different layers makes for a self-refreshing visual fugue whose shadow-play can be infinitely varied by manipulating the light source.