Richard Aldrich

Richard Aldrich’s work occupies a distinctive place in contemporary painting, moving between styles, categories and references without settling into any single mode. In his work, meaning is not delivered; it gradually takes shape. Painting remains the central vessel of his practice, yet his works operate as open systems in which images, texts, materials and memories circulate freely. A gestural flourish might sit beside a rudimentary figure, a found image, an exposed stretcher or a patch of colour that feels both incidental and necessary. Abstraction and figuration, density and spareness, elegance and awkwardness coexist without hierarchy.

Aldrich treats painting as a space of ongoing negotiation, where decisions are revised, interrupted, layered or left unresolved. At times, he cuts into the canvas or exposes what lies beneath, folding process back into the image itself. Forms recur across his practice, not as repetition but as transformation, allowing past and present to coexist within the same surface.

Conceptual, painterly and deeply personal without being confessional, Aldrich’s work invites the viewer to inhabit uncertainty. His paintings do not ask to be decoded so much as entered. They open, withhold and return, rewarding a kind of looking that is patient, associative and alive to doubt.

Richard Aldrich (b. 1975, Hampton, VA, USA) lives and works in New York. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Fondazione Giuliani, Rome (2022); Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle (2016); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2011); and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2011). Recent group exhibitions include presentations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan (2022) and the National Museum of Art, Osaka (2019). His work is held in numerous public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Dallas Museum of Art; ICA Miami; and the National Museum of Art, Osaka.