American artist Richard Aldrich is renowned for working within an expanded definition of painting. His works alternate between expressing an abundance of visual information and material reticence. 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. 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.
Featuring newly commissioned essays, this monograph presents the widest-ranging overview of Aldrich's practice to date, while providing new scholarship on an artist regarded as one of the most important painters working today.
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 Modern Art, London (2024, 2021, 2019); Gladstone Gallery, Seoul (2024); Fondazione Giuliani, Rome (2022); Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle (2016); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (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.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
