American, b. 1955, Boston, Massachusetts
Lives and works in Boston and Rockport, Massachusetts

Aaron Fink is a chronicler of materiality, in a sense like his precursors in the Pop Art movement. His complex paintings are more textured and emotionally resonant. 

Fink works with a variety of mediums including oils, woodblock prints, sculpture, and works on paper. The son of artist Barbara Swan, the path of an artist was clear to Fink at a young age. The artist received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and his MFA from the prestigious Yale University School of Art.

Fink loosely and sensuously captures ordinary objects, like fruit, flowers, a cup of coffee, an ice cream sundae and other subjects, in oil paint on board, often layering into and over the top with painterly, combed scrims that set up a cinematic blur. His woodcut monotypes are large-scale, and imbued with enhanced color and contrast for a super life-like effect bordering on Abstract Expressionism. “After I've worked with an object for a while, it becomes more of a vehicle for exploring the painting medium itself,” reflects the artist. In the early 1980s, Fink was associated with a new wave of Boston Expressionism, an arts movement marked by emotional directness, dark humor, social and spiritual themes, and a tendency toward figuration.

His work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States, Europe, Japan and Australia. Fink’s work is represented in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hara Museum, Tokyo, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, among many others. Fink was an artist-in-residence at Anderson Ranch in 1996 and 1998, received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1982 and 1987, and he was awarded an Artist in Fellowship from the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities, and in 1979 he was an Alternate in Painting for the Prix de Rome.