Eric N. Mack: You Red The Shirt Off My Back at Paula Cooper Gallery

Eric N. Mack's exhibition You Red The Shirt Off My Back is on view at Paula Cooper Gallery, 534 West 21st Street in Chelsea, through October 24, 2026. It is his second show with the gallery and brings together new free-standing and wall-based paintings along with an installation made in response to the space.

Mack has built his practice on textiles, using fabric as the primary material of painting and testing what the medium can be. Recent solo exhibitions took place at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and he has held residencies at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, and at BOFFO on Fire Island.

His abstract compositions invoke the flat picture plane and then undo it. Works hang on the wall, wrap around metal stretchers, or are pinned directly to the wall, and some push out into the architecture. The approach extends the legacy of artists who expanded painting into environmental installation, including Sam Gilliam, Robert Rauschenberg, and Christo and Jean-Claude. Mack uses both new and vintage fabrics, loaded with fashion and cultural associations, in varied textures, colors and weights. The layered results shift between movement and stillness, transparency and opacity, volume and flatness, monochrome and pattern.

The process starts with the pliability of cloth. Drawing on garments from his own archive and on material from fabric and thrift stores, he cuts, rips, dyes, sews, glues and pins until the originals are obscured, though their material character stays legible. That tension between recognition and abstraction is central to his work, and he sums it up as turning one's back to the lens as a gesture to abstract one's own form.

In this show the altered fabrics meet custom stainless steel armatures, which Mack calls "hybrid readymade structures." Textiles hover, fold and drift from walls and ceilings as staged interventions in the gallery. At the center of the room, sheer mesh and printed fabric descend from above, interrupting sightlines and steering viewers' movement. The works never offer a single complete view: as one side comes into focus, another is hidden.

The title comes from a text by the artist, which moves from jersey numbers and brand names to the language of fashion magazines and a scene on the street, where a mother and child are seen from behind. It closes on the idea of being only half visible, because others can see only your back.