Eric Helvie is a contemporary painter who lives and works in New York City. Helvie has a diverse artistic practice experimenting with abstraction, photorealism, screen-prints and bleed through paintings. Helvie’s work deals directly with the act of seeing, obsessive looking and optical ambiguity. Pulling from art history, television and film, his paintings act as props and icons, objects that gain meaning from their context and point to a larger system of understanding. 

In Helvie’s latest body of work entitled, ‘No Friends’, the artist pushes the boundaries of portraiture, developing this series from his earlier works. As stated by Helvie: “The idea for the No Friends series started back in 2006,” Helvie says, “I was young, living in a small town and wanted to make ten photorealistic portraits, one of each of my close friends and call the series, Ten Friends. Then my friend Matt Hawke told me to read Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut and a vast weirdness began to set in. I’d sit down to paint someone as realistically as I could and things would distort. The faces began to look more plastic and in some cases the eyes were missing altogether. I can’t blame it all on the science fiction though. I think a lot of it had to do with my limited ability as a young painter. I wanted to make things “look real” and I couldn’t do it. So somehow the answer was to just let go and allow the sci-fi to take over.”

In Helvie’s previous series, “O”, his paintings seamlessly move between the idea of abstraction and photorealism. Helvie captures ‘loading’ Instagram images from his own Instagram feed and painstakingly renders those images into richly coloured oil paintings. The resulting image is a purposefully unclear composition with a ‘loading’ circle centered, demanding the viewer to have patience and meditative appreciation to engage with the artworks.  Helvie has extensively exhibited in New York City, with his most recent solo exhibition at Massey Klein Gallery.  Helvie was also selected to be the artist in residence from 2015 to 2017 at Nord Anglia International School in New York City. Helvie’s works have been reviewed by ArtFuse, VICE, artnet and featured on PBS and in The Daily Beast. His artworks reside in numerous private collections.