Richard Aldrich - 2015
Right edge of untitled abstraction with poetry lines
Primarily working between the mediums of painting, sculpture, installation, and drawing, Aldrich’s practice defies categorization by a particular method of execution. The seemingly impulsive, abstracted forms that appear throughout his works often contradict the complexity of their origins, and reference motifs from his own practice in both direct and indirect ways. His installations of new and existing works transform disparate elements from separate units of matter into a single, larger entity that constitutes an investigation into the objecthood of the materials he selects. Often referencing a myriad of concepts and visual language from art history and popular culture, Aldrich’s inventive paintings, drawings, and sculptures are tied together by his incisive approach to visualizing immaterial concepts such as time and memory. Teetering between abstract and representational, conceptual and material, and macro and micro, Aldrich presents an interconnected network of systems with each exhibition, and the works in this presentation continue this tradition while inviting new techniques, subjects, and scales to permeate his practice.
Richard Aldrich was born in 1975 in Hampton, VA, and currently lives and works in New York. Solo exhibitions of Aldrich’s work have taken place at such institutions as Museum Dhont-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium (2017); 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; 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; The Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester; The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan; The Dallas Museum of Art; and the Smithsonian.
