Richard Aldrich (artist)

Richard Aldrich (born 1975 in Hampton, Virginia) is a Brooklyn-based painter who exhibited in the 2010 Whitney Biennial.

Aldrich received his BFA from the Ohio State University in 1998.

He is represented by Corvi-Mora in London, by Bortolami Gallery in New York, and Marc Foxx in Los Angeles, California.

He moved to New York City in 2000 and spent several years making text-based drawings and penning Calvinoesque poems and essays, which he sometimes published pseudonymously in ads in Zing magazine. Experiments in electronic music soon followed with band Hurray, a quartet that included Peter Mandradjieff, Zak Prekop, and Josh Brand.

Aldrich often works on gessoed panels with a mixture of oil paint, mineral spirits, and wax, which he lays on with a brush or palette knife. The combination of the resistant ground and viscid alloy registers his short hesitant strokes with tender congealed precision. His larger and breezier canvases have been compared to Philip Guston's transitional pictures from the mid-1960s (and also sometimes evoke Per Kirkeby or Joan Mitchell).

Although mostly abstract, Aldrich's paintings betray a distinctly literary sensibility, even as he targets what he has called the essential "unwordliness of experience." Snippets of text and random words-UFO, the numeral 4-appear as decals or pencil scrawls, while lines incised with the back of a brush suggest writing once removed. Taciturn pictures carry evocative and ungainly verbal appendages in the form of elliptical press releases or titles like Large Obsessed with Hector Guimard, 2008, a nod to the architect of Paris's Art Nouveau metro stations, or If I Paint Crowned I've Had It, Got Me, 2008, a telling paraphrase of Cézanne explaining he would be ruined if he tried to paint the "crowned" effect of a still life rather than the thing itself.

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