Eric Doeringer’s paintings, sculptures, photographs, videos, and artist’s books examine authorship, originality, ownership, and value through the act of copying. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1974, Eric studied Visual Art at Brown University before earning an MFA from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. While living in New York, he became fascinated by Canal Street vendors selling counterfeit designer handbags and began applying the same logic to contemporary art—another luxury object shaped by status, scarcity, and recognition. By remaking iconic works at accessible prices, Eric transforms familiar images into playful but pointed questions about what makes an artwork authentic.

“With the Bootlegs, I had this idea that I was going to make these things that are cheap, like a knockoff of these luxury goods. But I think over the years I became more interested in these questions of ownership, authenticity, and originality.”

In his North Hollywood studio, Eric begins by selecting works that are immediately recognizable yet simple enough to reproduce efficiently. He combines hand-painting with collage, silkscreen, or digital printing, often producing six to ten versions simultaneously. Working through an assembly-line process, he paints backgrounds in batches, adds mechanically reproduced elements, and finishes each canvas with selective overpainting.

The resulting Bootlegs are intentionally imperfect. They may resemble their sources at first glance, but irregular surfaces, inexpensive materials, altered scale, and visible handwork reveal their status as copies. Every piece is stamped with Eric’s name, distinguishing his practice from counterfeiting while drawing attention to how branding, craftsmanship, and context affect an artwork’s perceived legitimacy and value.

“My Bootlegs are intentionally ‘bad’—or ‘cheap’—copies of the artworks.”

In Yayoi Kusama (2024), Eric recreates the hypnotic visual language of Kusama’s Infinity Net paintings through a dense field of looping white marks and dark openings. From a distance, the repeated pattern suggests an immersive, continuous surface; closer inspection reveals variations in the size, shape, spacing, and direction of each painted loop.

The work depends upon recognition while refusing the precision or authority of an original. By reproducing Kusama’s signature imagery through visibly irregular handwork, Eric turns repetition into a study of artistic identity, asking whether authorship resides in an image, a process, a name, or the cultural value attached to all three.

Eric continues to expand the Bootleg series while producing larger, more materially faithful recreations of conceptual and contemporary artworks. Alongside paintings, he develops sculptures, photographs, videos, reenactments, editions, and artist’s books that test how meaning changes when an artwork is repeated by another hand. Following recent exhibitions at ICA Miami and Delahunty in London, his practice continues to challenge the boundaries between homage, appropriation, reproduction, and original creation.

Instagram