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Artist: Richard Aldrich

Modern Art is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of work by Richard Aldrich at its Bury Street gallery. This is Aldrich’s second solo exhibition with Modern Art.

Working between painting, sculpture, installation, and drawing, Richard Aldrich’s works are like complex psychic environments that, like most minds, are in multiple worlds at once. Occupied with the minutiae of an idiosyncratic personal existence - a self-contained system of meaning - they are at the same time facing outwards, as if seeking communication and exchange. As such, an exhibition by Aldrich hones in the shifting states from one painting to the next. Like fluctuating frames of mind, each work presents a different set of propositions made up of textures, words, gestures, colours or forms. Painterly abstraction, though, is tempered with a sharp particularity of cultural or historical references – in titles, in text within the work, or in sculptural objects in the space – offering another register of experience. Within these contextual shifts, Aldrich’s work reflects on how intelligence is attributed to objects in the act of interpreting them. As a whole, Aldrich’s exhibitions are constellations of interrelated, but heterogeneous parts that rely on each other to make their own kind of sense.

Aldrich’s exhibition at Modern Art includes a group of paintings made with oil, wax and felt on linen or board, as well as a felt hanging and several sculptural works. Most of the paintings were completed between 2020 and 2021, but, as is characteristic of Aldrich, many also have links to previous times in the artist’s life. For instance, Too often the art and ideas exist on the same plane (2018) replicates a text Aldrich wrote and exhibited in 2007 - then scribbled with Sharpie, now stencilled onto linen. Similarly, a felt piece from the 1990s with a quote made up by the artist, wryly misattributed to Abraham Lincoln, hangs from the ceiling of the gallery; a kind of fulcrum through which to experience the more reticent paintings in the show. In these paintings, Aldrich’s sensibility plays out in material explorations: wax is built up on linen or board, parts of surfaces are cut away, and paint is composited to make eccentric and compelling forms, figures, symbols and arrangements that extend and loop back through the development of his singular visual language.

Richard Aldrich was born in 1975 in Hampton, VA, and lives and works in New York, NY. Solo exhibitions of Aldrich’s work have taken place at such institutions as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, USA (2011), and the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, USA (2011). His work has been included in group exhibitions at museums including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Dallas Museum of Art; The Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester, and the Smithsonian.