DANIEL RICH 2024 by Miles McEnery Gallery

DANIEL!RICH

DANIEL RICH

511 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

515 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

520 West 21st Street New York NY 10011

WHEREVER!IT!IS!THAT!WE!ARE By Jesse Dorris

There was this feeling we all should be out in the streets. A!er we le! our offices and locked down, a!er the murder of George Floyd, during those days spent engridded in Zoom or unboxing deliveries of sundries and essentials, as we looked toward a world be#er than this one. There was a sense that structural disparities could be brought down. That sense came from an intuition anchored in days that were now data points in the moral arc: March 7, 1965 (the a#ack on 600 unarmed protestors as they crossed the Edmund Pe#us Bridge during the Selma to Montgomery march), April 25, 1993 (the day a million people or more joined the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation), February 15, 2003 (when millions of people in hundreds of cities around the world marched to stop the Iraq War), January 21, 2017 (the day some seven million global feminists assembled their own Women’s Marches). It was, in a sense, revelatory that this feeling still worked, still furnished people with the nerve to leave whatever li#le safety they felt in their homes, in their bones, and risk it for the world in the summer of 2020. In almost daily Black Lives Ma#er marches through almost every city in the country, marchers held up hope. Then there were the NYPD’s brutal arrests of, and a#acks on, protestors. Then pandemic unemployment benefits ran out. Then white supremacists staged a coup in the Capitol and built a rectangular gallows to hang Donald Trump’s vice president. It was a perverse inversion of the protest form. Everybody watched and wondered what could be done. And there was a feeling that maybe we should all just go inside for a while. Until recently, the artwork of Daniel Rich—paintings of tantalizing calculation and hue, monumental in content if rarely in size—concerned itself with exteriors. He

Daniel Rich, 531 Madison Ave, 2022, Acrylic on Dibond, 80 x 50 inches (203.2 x 127 cm) Courtesy of the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY

pitched facades of corporate headquarters and Trump’s moronic hypothetical walls and chunks of Brutalist real estate and slick verticals of hypersmooth glass at angles that emphasized their loom. Architecture was op art. Even his inside views looked up to the ceiling as if to suggest walls to pull down. Buildings were mere building blocks; a city was a playground. Children, of course, were wondrous, greedy things, and amid their pure joy of accumulation lurked tinges of raw fear that someone would take those toys and go home. The colors were candy to make your eyes ache. The impossible swoon of Rich’s grids, their memetic geometry, were o!en like some telepathic fever dream shared between the artist Bridget Riley and the real estate businesswoman Barbara Corcoran. His new work, though, looks for shelter. The newer canvases keep ducking into lobbies, as if to shake off the rain or an unknown (or all-too-known) surveillant. The trouble is, there’s no safety inside. On October 27, 2023, antiwar protestors shut down New York City’s arterial Grand Central Terminal. They came in from the street and assembled on the same polished floors businesspeople treaded a!er leaving the skyscrapers that Rich o!en used to paint and heading to trains for their homes beyond the city limits.

Below Grand Central’s celestial ceiling, with its Zodiac paintings of some strange map of fate, the protestors called for a cease-fire in the Israei war on Palestine. The Zodiac paintings had been painted backwards accidentally in 1913 and then covered with panels painted backwards intentionally in June 1945, just as Harry Truman was approving Operation Downfall, his plan to defeat Japan. That plan was scuppered a li#le more than a month later when atomic bombing did the trick. If the protestors had reached the fourth floor of Grand Central, they might have filled the ersatz greens of the Vanderbilt Tennis Club. In 1966, an immigrant from Hungary, Geza A. Gazdag, transformed what had originally been an art gallery, and then a CBS studio, into an urban playground boasting an astroturf ski slope, itself about four stories tall, along with a pair of tennis courts that are still open today. In Vanderbilt Tennis Club Court (2023), Rich paints the play surface an electric blue—a solid pool, with a porthole window not offering much light. The court seems to recede from view, fi#ing like another puzzle piece into the walls and ceilings. It doesn’t look fun. Here, love is only used for scoring. “We are considered,” the club’s website commands, “one of NYC’s best kept secret [sic], so don’t tell anyone!” Protestors haven’t yet made it into the Jimmy Dunn Dinner Dance at the Racquet Club of Philadelphia, which on its own website reminds members and their guests that “they are required to wear athletic shirts, shorts, or pants that are at least 80% white.” Off the court, “Smart Casual dress is acceptable … regarded as clothing that is in [sic] neat, modern office a#ire, yet relatively informal in style.” Rich’s landscape portrait of the place, The Racquet Club of Philadelphia (2023), is functionally three yellow lines that bend and a red line that does not, even when it presses over the yellow line like a tie clip or a nation’s border. Looking at the painting produces an auditory hallucination, not of the grunt and thwack of racquetball, but of a white noise grand enough to blanket any complications. The bookcases of Gropius House, Lincoln, MA (2023) are themselves building blocks, not just in their elegant expanses of bracketed white and blue planks but in how they stack the cultural production of hundreds of authors Rich refrains from

identifying. The book spines are redacted, or perhaps just abstracted, and thus a living area (or study or library) of the Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius becomes at once functionally without form (What is a library in which the titles of books cannot be read?) and pure form itself. Archive (For Hannah Arendt) (2023) goes further: Its rows of storage boxes are gravestones lit by the sun and moon. By my lights, they are terrifyingly solid, as if their contents have solidified and melded with their containers to become weights and measures of containment itself. One could stack them on a bench outside United Nations amphitheaters, like the one Rich depicts in FEBRUARY 24th 2022, 405 E 42ND ST, New York (2023). It depicts a bench of mid-century design par excellence, yet the bench feels as if it is glued to the floor it rests on. One could sit upon that bench and scream against that day’s Russian invasion of Ukraine, just as one could confe#i the chessboard floor with data and documents. The clock above the bench is frozen.

In the fall of 2015, Gabriel Hurier, a master dra!sman from the estate of the artist Sol LeWi#, called a group of students and artists together at the atrium of the Williams College Museum of Art in Massachuse#s, not all that far from the house of Walter Gropius. A video posted on YouTube on February 10, 2016, gives a timelapse look at the progress of their project: installing upon a white atrium wall an eye-warming work by Sol LeWi# called Wall Drawing #1089. For those who believe, perhaps a twist of fate connects the ceiling of Grand Central Station with the far more peaceful WCMA atrium: Like those horoscopic stacks of panels, the LeWi# iterations amass, with the gleaming cubes of #1089 replacing the rainbow diagonals of #959 (installed in 2001 and themselves a replacement of 1998’s #559). All iterations are concentric circles of primary colors. If there is poetry in LeWi#’s rigidity, it may be in the prompt: Here is an idea; I have these contours for it. Here are instructions for meditation, in ways so precise they’ll seem sui generis. In the stream, swatches of color appear, li#le unlit Rothkos emerging in equations of incredibly precise divisions of space and labor plus fields of color that should smother each other. Instead, they fuse. In Homage to Sol LeWi!’s Wall Drawing #1089, WCMA (2022), Rich reiterates a portrait of workers making another artist’s work in which all that is le! is a corner by the stairs. If LeWi# is making cages—and

Daniel Rich Original Color Map for his painting Hindenburg Haus, 2023

assuming he is, they counter the spindly trap of the Tron-like squared-off floor— it’s hard to know if the stairs lead above them or into them. More new paintings take the stairs: Dreilinden (2023) has them gently curling from view within a dead checkpoint between the old bisected Berlins. Their arc sends the whole building, viewed from what could be the street, spiraling. To make a painting, Rich takes a photograph. The locations of the photographs are destinations with identifying details cropped or otherwise kept from the frame, only to be reintroduced via final titles. Natural light is made supernatural with Photoshop. Rich covers an aluminum panel with translucent vinyl stickers and traces the photograph onto it. He then redraws, for accuracy. Architecture arrives with a knife; he cuts sections from the vinyl and fills them with paint—one by one, brick by brick. The colors in his cityscapes number in the hundreds. At first, inside, life seems to offer fewer rules. The pale#e of Hindenburg Haus (2023) seizes a brutal simplicity: A stairway banister terminates in a plane of blood red. A landing stacks a pale blue unmarked door below a bright blue window secured by a white cross. In this way, the simplest strokes take their place in an ascension of horror, a

Mondrian, Piet (1872 - 1944) © Copyright. Broadway Boogie Woogie. 1942-43. Oil on canvas, 50 x 50” (127 x 127 cm). Given anonymously. Location: The Museum of Modern Art/New York, NY/U.S.A.

goose-stepping diabolical version of Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43). There is a feeling that moving indoors keeps troubles from sight. Yet this building is a wishful thinking, a recasting by Rich of a 1737 landmark in Bauhaus garb, a fictional pile-up of form and function. There is also a feeling that, as in HKW, Berlin (2023), we can slip into a reliable elevator and ascend. The German government referred to institutions like this sunny yellow Haus der Kulturen der Welt as “lighthouses of culture.” It’s also the yellow of the umbrellas of Hong Kong, which protestors used to protect themselves from police officers’ pepper spray as they took to the streets on September 28, 2014. In Rich’s Hong Kong University (2023), their shadows climb the stairs—or perhaps their absence does. There’s a Vanderbilt pool blue, a creamy LeWi# grid. All of us are in this together, wherever it is that we are.

Jesse Dorris is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn.

Homage to Sol Lewi"’s Wall Drawing #1089, WCMA, 2022 Acrylic on Dibond 24 x 17 1⁄2 inches 61 x 44.5 cm

200 Park Ave (Lobby), 2023 Acrylic on Dibond 37 1⁄2 x 25 1⁄2 inches 95.3 x 64.8 cm

Archive (For Hannah Arendt), 2023 Acrylic on Dibond 34 x 24 inches 86.4 x 61 cm

Dreilinden, 2023 Acrylic on Dibond 33 1⁄2 x 24 inches 84.5 x 61 cm

FEBRUARY 24th 2022, 405 E 42ND ST, New York, 2023 Acrylic on Dibond 32 x 22 inches 81.3 x 55.9 cm

Gropius House, Lincoln, MA, 2023 Acrylic on Dibond 33 x 24 inches 83.8 x 61 cm

Hindenburg Haus, 2023 Acrylic on Dibond 33 x 24 inches 83.8 x 61 cm

HKW, Berlin, 2023 Acrylic on Dibond 32 x 24 inches 81.3 x 61 cm

Hong Kong University, 2023 Acrylic on Dibond 38 x 26 inches 96.5 x 66 cm

Servers, 2023

Acrylic on Dibond 32 x 24 1⁄2 inches 81.3 x 62.2 cm

The Racquet Club of Philadelphia, 2023 Acrylic on Dibond 34 x 24 inches 86.4 x 61 cm

Vanderbilt Tennis Club Court, 2023 Acrylic on Dibond 32 x 23 1⁄2 inches 81.3 x 59.7 cm

Title of Painting, 2018 Oil on canvas 78 3/4 x 59 inches 200 x 150 cm

DANIEL RICH Born in Ulm, Germany in 1977 Lives and works in Blowing Rock, NC EDUCATION 2004 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME MFA, Tu!s University, Medford, MA / School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA 2001 BFA, Atlanta College of Art, Atlanta, GA SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2024 “Parallels,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY 2022 “Flat Earth,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY 2020 “(co)vertex,” StudioTrouble, Berlin, Germany “Back to the Future,” Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY 2018 “Never Forever,” Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY 2014 “Systematic Anarchy,” Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY 2012 “Platforms of Power,” Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, MA

2011 “Berlin: Daniel Rich and Wieland Speck,” Horton Gallery, New York, NY 2009 “1989-2009: Paintings of the Berlin Airports 20 Years a!er the Fall of the Wall,” Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, IL 2008 “Downburst,” Perry Rubenstein Gallery, New York, NY 2007 “Black Sunday,” SUNDAY, New York, NY “Baghdad,” Mario Diacono Gallery, Boston, MA 2006 “Torre Velasca,” Mario Diacono Gallery, Boston, MA 2005 “Project Space,” Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York, NY GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2023 “Nocturne,” Andrew Rafacz, Chicago, IL “Interactions of Color,” Turchin Center for the Arts, Boone, NC 2022 “Dreamland” (curated by Soraja Helac), Helac Fine Art, Charlo#e, NC “Otherworldly,” Mucciaccia Gallery, London, United Kingdom 2021 “Studio Visit,” Collezione Maramo#i, Reggio Emilia, Italy Weber Fine Art, Greenwich, CT

“Beyond the Streets on Paper,” Southampton Arts Center, Southampton, NY 2020 “Endless State,” The Skowhegan Alliance, New York, NY 2019 “Mensch in Moll,” Inter Port, Berlin, Germany “Geometric Heat,” GR Gallery, New York, NY “Invisibli,” Anna Marra Contemporanea, Rome, Italy “Set for the Sun” (curated by Jenne Grabowski), Lobe Block, Berlin, Germany “#” (curated by Markus Linnenbrink), Cindy Rucker Gallery, New York, NY

2018 “In My Room: Artists Paint the Interior 1950Now,” The Fralin Museum of Art, University of Virginia, Charlo#esville, VA 2017 “A!er the Fall,” Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY “Urbanopolis,” Galerie LJ, Paris, France 2016 “Postcard from New York,” Anna Marra Contemporanea, Rome, Italy “Summer Group Show,” Joshua Liner Gallery, New York, NY 2015 “On a Boat, Looking to Land: Gil Heitor Cortesão & Daniel Rich,” Carbon 12, Dubai, United Arab Emirate 2014 “Résonance(s),” M Maison Particulière, Brussels, Belgium

“Epic Fail 2,” Active Space, Brooklyn, NY 2013 “October 18, 1977” (curated by Birgit Rathsmann), Gasser Grunert Gallery, New York, NY 2012 “Summer Group Show,” Joshua Liner Gallery, New York, NY “Divergence,” Lower East Side Printshop, New York, NY 2011 “LANY” (curated by Mario Diacono), Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY “Chainle#er,” Golden Parachute, Berlin and Samsøñ Projects, Boston, MA 2009 “Ra#led by the Rush,” Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, IL “Slow Photography,” Sunday, New York, NY “Transitions-Painting at the (other) end of art,” Collezione Maramo#i, Reggio Emilia, Italy 2008 “A Sorry Kind Of Wisdom,” Perry Rubenstein Gallery, New York, NY 2006 “Material Ma#ers,” Maryland Art Place, Baltimore, MD “We Build the Worlds Inside Our Heads,” Freight+Volume, New York, NY 2005 Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York, NY “Skowhegan Projects,” Skowhegan State Fair, Skowhegan, ME

2004 “Combined Talent,” Tallahassee Museum of Fine Art, Tallahassee, FL “Summer Distillation,” Miller Block Gallery, Boston, MA “Site Specifics,” ArtSpace, Malden, MA “The Sublime is (still) now” (curated by Joe Wolin), Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York, NY “Axiom,” Gallery 4, Baltimore, MD “Constellations,” Tu!s University, Medford, MA 2003 “Properties,” H. Lewis Gallery, Baltimore, MD “CRG Advisors & Dragon Foundation Scholarship Recipients,” Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta, GA “Referencing Perspective,” Gallery 100, Atlanta, GA “Deconstruction and Recomposition,” The Art Farm, Atlanta, GA AWARDS 2022 Artist Grant, North Carolina Arts Council, Raleigh, NC 2017 Print Residency, Lower East Side Printshop, New York, NY 2015 Traveling Scholars Grant, School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston at Tu!s University, Boston, MA 2012 Painting Fellow, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York, NY

2011 Keyholder Residency Award, Lower East Side Printshop, New York, NY 2010 Space Program Residency, Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, New York, NY Residency, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE 2004 Full Fellowship, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME Travel Grant, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA 2001 Graduate Fellowship, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA Ben Shute Scholarship for Excellence in Representational Art, Atlanta College of Art, Atlanta, GA Dragon Foundation Scholarship, Atlanta College of Art, Atlanta, GA SELECT COLLECTIONS Fidelity Art Collection, Boston, MA Hudson Valley Museum of Contemporary Art, Peekskill, NY Maramo#i Collection, Reggio Emilia, Italy Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, MA Rollins Museum of Art, Winter Park, FL Wellington Management, Boston, MA

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

DANIEL!RICH PARALLELS 8 February – 23 March 2024 Miles McEnery Gallery 511 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com Publication © 2023 Miles McEnery Gallery All rights reserved Essay © 2023 Jesse Dorris Photo credit: p. 8: © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY and © 2024 Mondrian/Holtzman Trust Publications and Archival Associate Julia Schlank, New York, NY Photography by Dan Bradica, New York, NY Martin Müller, Berlin, Germany Catalogue layout by Spevack Loeb, New York, NY ISBN: 979-8-3507-2554-4 Cover: FEBRUARY!"#TH!"$""%!#$&!E!#"ND!ST, New York, (detail), 2023