David Rich: Upon the Slow Read

Press Release

Skoto Gallery is pleased to present Upon the Slow Read, an exhibition of paintings by the American artist David Rich. This is his second solo show at the gallery. The reception is on Thursday, May 2nd, 6-8pm. The artist will be present.

The paintings of David Rich are rooted in the physicality of urban landscape and the luminous buzz of evening light. As abstract paintings, they also evoke something even more local—an intimate sense of lived experience within one’s body, including pre-verbal observations not yet coalesced into fixed images—alive and reconfiguring at the level of our synapses.

Densely layered and decisively edited, these paintings set up a spatial structure that appears to shift as implied connections and ghost images assert an alternate read. Elemental constructions of interior/exterior spaces and visual dialogues of call-and-response phrases, the resulting paintings feel solid and rooted, yet open and breathing. These paintings reflect a particular attitude about improvisation that focuses not on complex elaboration, but rather on the elemental way that the parts contribute to the underlying visual statement, with a spare and concentrated economy of means in which nothing is extra, and everything is necessary. The resultant paintings take shape through inquiry and dialogue over time, becoming charged and resonant visual situations for looking at, and into—a place for durational seeing and thought.

David Rich (b. 1952, Chicago) is a painter and educator living and working in Beacon, NY. His education includes Philadelphia College of Art, Kansas City Art Institute, New York Studio School Paris Session, Skowhegan and University of Oregon, MFA. Teaching includes Minneapolis College of Art and Design (1985-2010). Visiting Artist Lectures include Hartford Art School, Maryland Institute College of Art, and Universities of Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. Solo exhibitions include Skoto Gallery, NYC; Satori Fine Art, Chicago; Franz Bader Gallery, Washington DC and Bernal Gallery, Chicago. Group exhibitions include Frye Museum, Seattle; Grimaldis Gallery, Baltimore; Robert Steele Gallery, NYC; Poiesis Spec, Berlin; and Grayson Gallery, Chicago. Museum collections include Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Weisman Museum, and Minnesota Museum of American Art. Private collections nationally and internationally.