Warriors with Messengers

Paul Ecke's  "Warriors" will take your breath away. Based on a cleansing journey after winning his battle with cancer, these sculptures touch on all aspects of humanity.

Paul Ecke is a noted mid-career painter of contemporary non-figurative and figurative works on canvas and panel. His traditional works are an amalgam of color, texture, and movement that find form on the canvas through a vigorous application process utilizing hand, brush, and trowel. Yet, in a seminal departure from his signature oeuvre, he spent a large part of the last decade producing his poignant and personal series “Warriors with Messengers,” a display of life-sized sculptures representing various people from the artists’ past who have been touched by cancer. Ecke drew inspiration from his own experience with cancer to create this extraordinary grouping, which traveled and found audience with the Centro Cultural Tijuana (CECUT) museum before its current location at Hohmann. 

The works were conceived during Ecke’s pilgrimage to Abadiania, Brazil in 2014, a trip to a spiritual site that was undertaken with the goal of physical healing in mind. While spending two weeks at this sacred space, he visualized all those he knew that were equally touched by the enigmatic disease. The results became ethereal figures, each attributed with, and infused by the energy of particular traits Ecke remembered each of them by: love, compassion, perseverance, knowledge, strength, and the like.  These meditations on friends and family resulted in “messages” that Ecke incorporated into the work through symbols such as butterflies, crystals, or birds. 

Although the pieces all share the same foundations of resin and metal, they are animated further by various materials including hemp, clay, fabrics, and copper, yet all retain an overall white palette. Ecke used the color with intention to invoke purification and cleansing as well as the sublime cycles of life’s transitions, endings, and beginnings.   

For a closer look at this series and a short virtual gallery tour, please enjoy the video above. During this time of social distancing and worldwide concern over the coronavirus, our gallery will remain virtual. Yet, we are still available for any questions you might have about this work or others. Feel free to call us at 760-346-4243.

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More information about Paul Ecke: www.hohmann.art/ecke