Eric Serritella: Abscission
December 13, 2025–July 19, 2026 | Schaefer Gallery
Eric Serritella: Abscission brings together over a decade of the artist’s ceramic and glass works—sculptures that slip between the natural and the uncanny with disarming conviction. He is best known for his hyper-realistic ceramic trompe l’oeil sculptures: birch trunks whose bark curls at the edges, charred logs captured mid-split, driftwood that appears softened by time and tide. Abscission is the botanical term for the moment a plant releases what it no longer needs: a leaf, a spent blossom, or layer of bark. It marks both an ending and start of a new phase of growth. Serritella’s practice reflects that same cycle of release and emergence.
What distinguishes Serritella’s approach is not literal mimicry but a deep resonance with what he calls the energy and emotion of trees. Rather than sculpt from specimens, he carves from memory—melding species, textures, and gestures into forms that feel entirely plausible yet subtly impossible. His works inhabit a liminal space: they appear as remnants from the forest, but their quiet distortions make clear that they are something else entirely, shaped by an artist who treats clay as a conduit for story and pathos.
Recently, Serritella has expanded his practice through explorations in glass, bringing color, translucency, and a new sense of internal radiance into dialogue with his ceramic work. These pieces mark another kind of abscission: the artist opening new material possibilities while remaining rooted in the themes that ground his practice. Glass allows him to express fragility, luminosity, and movement in ways clay resists, while clay continues to anchor his forms in the textures and rhythms of the natural world. Seen together, the two materials reveal a practice shaped by transformation and renewal, encouraging viewers to reflect on how change— in nature or in ourselves—can open us to new ways of seeing.