Eric Orr

ERIC ORR FIRST EXHIBITED as an artist in 1964, in the student center of the University of Cincinnati.  Orr moved to Los Angeles in 1966 and lived there until his passing in 1998. In California he found an art-historical stream that he could enter comfortably, not least because at that time the various West Coast movements were regarded by their adherents as constituting a new beginning for art, cut off from European art history. For a decade or so he has been grouped with James Turrell, Doug Wheeler, Maria Nordman, Robert Irwin, and others loosely called space-light or phenomenological artists; in work by these and related artists, our perceptual situation is manipulated in order to focus attention on the vagaries of the perceptual process itself. Within this category Orr’s work is conspicuous in its use of deliberate allusions to ancient religious and magical traditions.