Richard Aldrich

(American, born 1975)

Richard Aldrich is a contemporary American conceptual artist and painter. Aldrich addresses his own personal history and the way that humans organize information through the formal language of painting, freely citing various aesthetic tropes with humor and irreverence. Aldrich is best known for his loose, abstract compositions, moving freely from gestural mark-making, text-based printing, and cutting the canvas to reveal stretcher bars underneath. “There's a way that my art always looks the same, but what's progressing is an understanding of how paintings can exist or interact, how they relate to each other and to our understanding of history and how history is determined,” he has explained. “To me, that interaction was always the thing. It's about seeing things not in a linear way, but in an elliptical way.” Born in 1975 in Hampton, VA, Aldrich earned his BFA at Ohio State University in 1999. He has been associated at times with the Provisional Painting movement by writer Raphael Rubinstein, and was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.