Eric Rottcher is a mixed media collage artist based in Silver Spring, MD. Born and raised in Waynesboro, PA—a rural town surrounded by farmland—he grew up feeling creatively and culturally out of step with his environment. That early dissonance shaped the raw, unfiltered aesthetic that defines his work today.
He earned his BA in Art with a concentration in Aesthetics from Shippensburg University in 2011. His studies in the philosophy of beauty and perception gave him a framework he now resists. Eric rejects traditional ideals of beauty, favoring contradiction and tension—working between memory and erasure, secrecy and confession, humor and grief. His work is grounded in personal experience: addiction, loss, and the lasting impact of his mother’s aneurysm continue to inform both the content and emotional tone of his collages.
Self-described as a “Lowbrow Fine Artist,” Eric builds a visual language from recurring symbols—party hats, wilted flowers, teeth, and eyeballs blooming like blossoms. These stand-ins for emotional truth evoke excess, loss, fear, and hyper-awareness. His images speak quietly but carry weight.
His current series, The After Party, focuses on the emotional aftermath of addiction and self-destruction. Through fractured figures, spiritual debris, and surreal iconography, the work explores what’s left when the noise dies down—the clarity, shame, and strange beauty that emerge in the wreckage.
Eric favors process over polish, irreverence over idealism, and emotional honesty over tidy narratives. His work has been exhibited nationally in solo and group shows and is held in private collections throughout the U.S. and abroad.
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