eri king

eri king (b. Kagoshima, Japan) is a New York-based artist working in painting, drawing, mixed media, and installation. She creates allegorical paintings that examine how sacred and commercial spaces use visual strategies to shape perception, belief, desire, and behavior. Her work merges the illusionistic techniques of historical painting with the persuasive language of contemporary consumer culture, exploring how spectacle and illusion intersect with desire, agency, and power.

Rooted in collage logic, King combines references from art history, mythology, ritual, consumerism, gaming, and pop culture. She draws on Renaissance and Baroque visual techniques, including trompe-l’oeil, linear perspective, naturalism, dramatic composition, and ornamentation, examining how these methods were used to produce awe, spectacle, and belief in the service of religious authority. These strategies find contemporary counterparts in merchandising, commercial design, and entertainment, where illusion and spectacle function as visual technologies of power and influence. King recontextualizes these techniques by combining them across sacred and commercial contexts, questioning where agency resides within scripted spaces designed to engineer desire.

King immigrated to the United States as a child and grew up in Las Vegas, where casinos became an early source of visual education. Their maze-like layouts and elaborate carpet patterns became a conceptual framework for her compositions. In her paintings, dense patterns extend across architecture and subjects, destabilizing perception and camouflaging forms within the pictorial space.

In recent paintings, King stages Cupid, the mythological god of desire, as a figure through which attraction and coercion converge. Classical architecture and divine iconography merge with the visual language of casinos, creating environments that reveal how spectacle and desire inform behavior within systems of profit and influence.

BIO

eri king received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art and Art History from the University of Las Vegas, Nevada, in 2011 and her Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Hunter College in 2018. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. King is one half of the collaborative art duo Eridan, alongside NY-based artist Daniel Greer, and is a member-curator at Field of Play Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY.

From 2011 to 2014, she was the co-founder and curator of the artist-run spaces 5th Wall Gallery and Project Space in Las Vegas. She has had solo exhibitions at Winchester Cultural Center Gallery, Las Vegas, NV (2013); Miranda Kuo Gallery, New York, NY (2016); Catskills Gallery, New York, NY (2021); ASAP Gallery, Las Vegas, NV (2024); and SPRING/BREAK Art Show NYC (2025).

Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including High Visibility, GOCA Gallery (2026), Space Shifters, Tappeto Volante (2026), Living Here, Marjorie Barrick Museum (2025), Off the Grid, 5-50 Gallery, NYC (2024), SPRING/BREAK Art Show NYC (2024), The Big Duck, Carracci Art Gallery, NYC (2022), Financial Times' Global Boardroom, UK (2020), the London Biennale in Nevada (2012, 2020), and the Every Woman Biennial (2019), among others. Her work is included in the permanent collection of the City of Las Vegas and the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Currently:

8 September - 21 November: Solo exhibition, fingers crossed, One River School, Larchmont, NY

Fall 2025 to present: Visiting Assistant Professor, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY

Upcoming:

12 October - 23 October: Group exhibition, Babel, Stuben Gallery, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY

Fall/Winter 2026: Curatorial, TBT, Field of Play Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

Selected Recent Press:
Art Spiel
Two Coats of Paint
Couch in the Desert
Southwest Contemporary
Seeing Color: Podcast interview
SchoolArts Magazine

eriking.net

erijking@gmail.com