Eric N. Mack: A Whole New Thing
Experience a new, Wex-commissioned installation by Eric N. Mack, who is known for his large-scale fabric assemblages.
Eric N. Mack’s installation for the lobby commission at the Wexner Center for the Arts deepens his ongoing inquiry into abstraction and reveals a painterly sensibility. Mack foregrounds the expressive and transformative potential of fabric—not only as a material, but as an atmospheric, structural, and social medium. Titled A Whole New Thing, this site-responsive work activating the lobby, staircase, and café areas extends Mack’s long-standing engagement with architecture and public space.
Throughout his career, Mack has created installations for diverse architectural contexts—from the Venetian classicism of Palazzo Grassi and the raw brutalism of Dublin’s Douglas Hyde Gallery to an abandoned gas station at the edge of California’s Salton Sea. In each instance, and now at the iconic Wexner Center, Mack’s interventions demonstrate a sensitive but assertive dialogue with the site. Here, the installation does not simply inhabit space but rearticulates it, proposing new visual and spatial rhythms through a choreography of color and fabric. The textiles do more than hang or drape. They convey tension, gravity, and fragility.
A Whole New Thing is architectural in scale, improvisational in method, and painterly in spirit. It encourages perception of detail, atmosphere, and the social and structural frameworks in which art is made and encountered. As air, light, gravity, and time affect the fabrics, the installation remains alert and alive, in conversation with its site and its viewers.
“Mack calls the works 'fabric collages,' and styles them into sculptures and monumental installations that explore histories of both art and fashion and transform the spaces they take up.”