Aldrich received his BFA from the Ohio State University in 1998.
Career
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.
Aldrich's inquisitive approach to his paintings extends both to the way they come to occupy a space and to the space from which they come. His work does not depict the life of the studio but embodies it directly, reconstituting the books, postcards, records, and junk he happens to have lying around. A failed attempt at a jury-rigged curtain or a page of poetry might wind up on a canvas, while a collaged element might get ripped off, leaving behind a frayed paper scar.
In Aldrich's hands, all the cutting, stretching, and collaging are not so much operations or strategies or ends unto themselves. Rather, they are yet more tools in the resourceful painter's arsenal, just like the different kinds of paint he uses, and the instruments with which he applies them, and the gunk he mixes in. Aldrich's paintings wear their disfigurement easily, without a feeling of brainy exposition or true bodily harm. Their sense of humble panache lies precisely in the way aggressive acts can cohabit with milder ones while still retaining a lively renegade charge. Indeed, Aldrich's most radical proposition may be his commitment to nudging painting forward via a combination of inquisitive tinkering and truculent gestures that would otherwise have left it undone. This does not make for an ahistorical, reactionary enterprise or for an unsophisticated one. If anything, his paintings abrade the false dichotomy between innocence and understanding. The possibilities for painting lie all around us, he suggests; the trick is knowing how to frame the choice.
Solo Exhibitions
2012
Half of What I Say, dépendance, Brussels
2011
New Work: Richard Aldrich, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA
Once I Was…, Bortolami, New York, NY
Museo, Corvi Mora, London, UK
Richard Aldrich and the 19th Century French Painting, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis, MO (cat.)
2010
Slide Paintings, Marc Foxx, Los Angeles, CA
Misako and Rosen, Tokyo, Japan
2009
Of Two Bodies as One, dépendance, Brussels, Belgium
Art Statement, Art I 40 I Basel, Switzerland
Bortolami, New York, NY (cat)
2008
Narrative with 5 Characters, Corvi-Mora, London, UK
2007
Marc Foxx, Los Angeles, CA
Paintings, Roger Björkholmen Galleri, Stockholm, Sweden
2006
Corvi-Mora, London, UK
2005
Hurray, (with Hurray), Project Room, Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York, NY
2004
Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery, New York, NY
Selected Group Exhibitions
2012
Out of the Blue, Bortolami, New York, NY
Soundworks, ICA, London, UK
How Do It Know, Essex Street, New York, NY
Contemporary Painting, 1960 to the Present: Selections from the SFMOMA Collection, SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA
Risk + Reward, Foster Gallery, University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, WI
2011
The Bridgehampton Biennial, Martos Gallery, Bridgehampton, NY
Straw, Hannah Barry Gallery, London, UK
Catalogue of the Exhibition, Triple V, Paris, France
Time Again, Sculpture Center, New York, NY (cat.)
With One Color, Van de Weghe Fine Art, New York, NY
Provisional Painting, Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London, UK
Five Easy Pieces, Galleria Franco Noero, Turin, Italy
Creating the New Century: Contemporary Art From the Dicke Collection, Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH (cat.)
Rational Abstraction, Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago de Compostela, Spain (cat.)
2010
Painting Extravaganza, Cardi Black Box, Milan, Italy
Re-Dressing, Bortolami, New York, NY
New Work From New York, Golden Gallery, Chicago, IL
Gradation, Portugal Arte 10, Lisbon, Portugal
Next Generation, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland
Le Tableau, Cheim and Read, New York, NY
Exhibition #3, The Emily Harvey Foundation, New York, NY
