Working within an expanded definition of painting, Richard Aldrich’s works alternate between expressing an abundance of visual information, and material reticence; a kind of withholding of their contents. In this way, they are like complex psychic environments that, like most minds, are in more than one world at once: the internal and the external. Occupied with the minutiae of an idiosyncratic personal existence – a self-contained system of meaning – his works are situated in private dialogue with himself and with painting that occasionally unveils itself to the viewer. At the same time, however, they are very much outward facing, seeking communication and exchange. His imagery might range from richly dappled abstractions in oil and wax, to a primed canvas containing purely a line written by British psychiatrist Henry Maudsley in 1918. Such variation in imagery is matched by radical interventions into the materiality of the painting itself, such as physically dismantling the canvas, which he often incises to create insertable pockets or to expose the stretcher bars behind the canvas. As such, the focus of an exhibition by Aldrich is on the shifting states from one work to the next. Like fluctuating frames of mind, each work presents a different set of propositions which may simultaneously clarify and confound their neighbouring works. Within these contextual shifts, Aldrich’s exhibitions are constellations of interrelated, but heterogeneous parts that reflect on each other to create different levels of potential understanding, which, in a broader sense, seek to consider how intelligence is attributed to objects in the act of interpreting them.

Richard Aldrich was born in 1975 in Hampton, VA, and lives and works in New York City. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Fondazione Giuliani, Rome (2022); Modern Art, London (2021); Museum Dhondt- Dhaenens, Deurle (2016); SFMOMA, San Francisco (2011); and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2011). He has participated in recent group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan (2022); the National Museum of Art, Osaka (2019); Aïshti Foundation, Beirut (2018); and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2018). Aldrich’s works are held in collections including MoMA, New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; SFMOMA, San Francisco; the Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester, UK; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.