About

Eric Rottcher is a mixed-media artist based in Silver Spring, Maryland, whose work serves as a tactile record of survival, loss, and eventual reclamation. His trajectory was not a traditional, linear climb, but rather a path shaped by unconventional choices and profound detours. After earning his BA in Art from Shippensburg University, his creative life was abruptly halted by a family crisis.

Armed with a fresh art degree but stranded miles from any creative hub, Rottcher’s artistic career was sidelined by the 2010 financial crisis and a sudden family tragedy. Returning to the rural isolation of his hometown, Waynesboro, PA, to care for his mother after a brain aneurysm, the combined weight of caregiving and solitude spiraled into a decade-long battle with addiction.

For years, the brushes were put down; the polished corridors of the art world were replaced by the stark, internal struggle of what would eventually become his "after party."

With those dark days behind him, Rottcher’s work is a direct response to that lost time. His process of collage and décollage—the physical act of layering materials only to aggressively rip, scrape, and scar them—is an echo of his own history. He does not seek to hide the damage; he celebrates the evidence of revision. In his studio, a mistake is simply a layer of truth. His visual language is a collision of high- and lowbrow aesthetics: classical Greek busts are subverted by festive party hats and fragmented, imperfect anatomical forms. By presenting the body in states of incompletion or decay, he mirrors the fragility of the human experience and the realities we often bury.

Rottcher’s celebrated After Party series is the heartbeat of his current practice, confronting the seductive euphoria of excess and the hollow, shivering silence that remains once the crowd vanishes. His work offers no easy closures or tidy endings. Instead, it insists on a confrontation with the scars of human experience, proving that what is broken can be reconstructed into something more honest than what existed before.

Today, Rottcher is a visible and ascending presence in the DMV art scene. Living and working in Silver Spring, he has translated his personal reclamation into professional momentum, making waves through frequent exhibitions in Maryland galleries and museums. His recent presence in the regional contemporary landscape serves as both a homecoming and a new beginning—a testament to an artist who has reclaimed his voice and is now using it to challenge and engage a growing audience. Through his ongoing practice, Rottcher proves that the most enduring beauty is not found in perfection, but in the grit and honesty of what remains.