Commemorating a crisis: the first monograph on Eric Rhein, poetical chronicler of the AIDS epidemic in photos, drawings and assemblages This is the first book on the work of American artist Eric Rhein (born 1961), whose career has spanned four decades. This unique monograph-memoir features intimate photographs, taken between 1989 and 2012. The self-portraits and images of friends and lovers correspond to the period spanning Rhein's HIV diagnosis, his subsequent near death and his experience of a renewed sense of vitality. New York Times critic Holland Cotter wrote of Rhein's work: "the combination of art and craft, delicacy and resiliency, feminine and masculine, is exquisitely wrought and is, as it should be, seductive but disturbing." As a personal response to the AIDS crisis, Rhein's compelling portraits highlight tenderness and care as life-saving instincts. Included are related bodies of work: delicate assemblages and wire drawings, often serving as memorials for fallen friends. Rhein's photography, wire drawings, sculpture and watercolors honor love, touch, connection to nature, and familial history. Rhein mines collective and personal narratives, formulating pieces that are at once poetic and documentarian. Mark Doty and Paul Michael Brown contribute essays.
Reviews
A compilation of tonal, monochromatic photography and mixed-media, Lifelines is a series of artworks taken and collected between 1989 and 2012... recording an important and personal period of history. -- Ayla Angelos * PORT Magazine *
The American artist's images are as seductive as they are harrowing. His new monograph features self-portraits and images of friends and lovers, captured shortly after he was diagnosed with HIV in the 1980s. -- Emily Gosling * Elephant *
Lifelines is both a catalogue and a visual memoir that chronicles the lives of friends, comrades, lovers, and peers... [the photographs are] crops of idyllic days spent between heartbreak and tenderness, as well as contemplation and bliss. -- Osman Can Yerebakan * AnOther *
[Rhein's] practice revolves around his understanding of the human experience, the relationships we make, the objects we hold and attach so much meaning to. He works in multiple mediums to convey this: delicately constructed assemblages, wire drawings of leaves serving as memorials, his personal photographs, and watercolors. -- Alexandria Deters * Easel Magazine *
Beautiful young men, sick but not visibly so, wrapped naked in each other's arms. Fragile little sculptures composed of wire, buttons, jewels, and other found objects. And penises-lots and lots of penises, most in a state of peaceful repose. All of that is to be found in Lifelines, a new collection of about 30 years of work from Kentucky-bred, longtime New York City-based artist Eric Rhein, 59, who nearly died of AIDS in the mid-'90s before the protease treatment revolution brought him, along with so many others (if not all), back to life and health. -- Tim Murphy * The Body *



Book Information
ISBN 9781732848238
Author Eric Rhein
Format Hardback
Page Count 112
Imprint Insitute 193
Publisher Insitute 193