BIOGRAPHY
Paul Wackers was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1978. He received a BFA from Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC, and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Recent solo exhibitions include The Space We Take at Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco, California (2021); IN A HOUSE OF SHIFTING FORMS at Alice Gallery in Brussels, Belgium (2019); and Silent Language at Galeria Impakto in Lima, Peru (2018). Recent group exhibitions include Earth’s Debit at Public Land in Sacramento, California (2022); Twenty Year Anniversary Exhibition at Morgan Lehman Gallery in New York (2022); and Nature Morte at The Hole in New York (2021). Wackers’ work can be found in collections including MIMA Museum in Brussels, Belgium. Wackers lives and works in New York.
His work is in the MIMA Museum (Brussels, BE) and many prominent private and public collections, including Chevron Corporation, Fidelity Investments, Ellie Mae Corporate Collection and Stanford Children's Hospital. He also installed a large public mural on the James Hotel in New York City.
He received the Tournesol Painting Prize in 2008 with an awarded residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts (Marin County, CA), the NKDale Residency (Sunfjord, Norway), Encore (Brussels, BE), and an artist residency at the Byrdcliffe Colony (Woodstock, NY), and the Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts, (Portland, ME).
Paul Wackers has been exhibiting with Eleanor Harwood Gallery since 2006. He lives and works in New York City.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Paul Wackers works from personal experience, pulling from objects and places he sees, feels and keeps close. He makes objects and paintings to try to understand what they are, what they mean, and how he should understand them. Many of the subjects are things that seem very familiar but through the process of painting or sculpture become confused or unreal because of the associations created within the picture.