My paintings begin with subconscious images. Ideas begin to transform and coalesce with painted events that translate into form. This becomes the conceptual "happening" on the canvas surface.  Paint becomes transmuted into drips, splashes, spills or geometric forms in space. The paintings take on a meditative quality as matter breaks apart, a collision of inner and outer worlds.  Form becomes intertwined or dissolves into a delicate otherworldly language of raw formal elegance. 

I have always been interested in abstract space and the play between illusion, spatial dimension and the picture plane. The paintings constitute complex visual references unhinged upon personal narratives, science, natural phenomena, cosmological events, chaos and order and their transformative ideas of energy, destruction and recreation, as well as metaphysics, light, and salvation.

Erik Hanson graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago and participated in many gallery exhibitions including "Emerging" at The Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago. In 1985 Hanson was selected best emerging artist by nationally published art critic, art historian James Yood in conjunction with the "Emerging" exhibition. In the 1980s Hanson became an integral member of New York City’s1985 East Village art scene, exhibiting at various galleries. In 1998 Hanson graduated from the Pratt Institute with a Master of Science degree and moved to his current residence in Peekskill, New York. Hanson has exhibited both nationally in the Westchester, NY area and internationally in the 2003 Florence Biennale Internazionale Dell’Arte Contemporanea. His work is in various private collections, in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and in the Museum of Modern Art.