SEOUL.- Gladstone presents Double Gemini, Richard Aldrich’s first solo exhibition in South Korea. Spanning the lower gallery and first floor, the exhibition comprises paintings and sculptures from the past decade, underscoring Aldrich’s view of his practice as a continuous, evolving body of work within which individual works are just parts. Throughout his career, the artist’s curatorial approach to installation has reflected an ongoing investigation into the recontextualization of objects and ideas, forging new relationships and meaning across forms, mediums, and scale.

Aldrich’s work is grounded in a longstanding commitment to innovation within his practice. Over the last twenty years, he has developed a visual language that deftly navigates the binaries in abstract and figurative forms while teetering between the conceptual and the physical properties in his mark-making. Meaning arises from the interplay between the work’s materially rich surface and the cultural and autobiographical allusions that he weaves into his compositions. Aldrich’s distinctive painterly touch is characterized by his material experimentations with oils and wax, varying degrees of solvents, and the application of found objects to his surfaces. The intricately worked layers present a nonlinear narrative reiterating the work’s potential for interpretation and offering insight into Aldrich’s world. The artist’s references span a wide array of influences, from art history and popular culture, to video games and science fiction. Articulating the breadth of the artist’s wide-ranging interests, the paintings in this exhibition resist easy categorization. Altogether, Aldrich’s work reveals compelling visual and thematic fluidity across the boundaries of perception, conjuring discernible references alongside intangible ideas such as memory and time to present an interconnected network of possibilities.

Richard Aldrich (b. 1975, Hampton, Virginia) lives and works in New York. Aldrich has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including Fondazione Giuliani, Rome (2022); Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium (2016); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California (2011); and the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis (2011). Aldrich has been included in group exhibitions at notable institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Busan, South Korea. Aldrich’s work is in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, United Kingdom; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., and the National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan.

Artist Statement

Initially I had the idea to think of the two floors of the gallery as the dual sides of a personality. Personalities usually have more than two sides, but for the sake of the show, I thought that it could be generalized into two. There is a bit of an embarrassment to such a basic idea, but I think often good things come out of bad ideas. It’s like the old axiom: bad ideas make good art (and its sister axiom: good ideas make bad art). This has often been an interest of mine, to take something so strongly and magnetically attached to an already ordained idea and somehow wrench it free. Twenty years ago, I was interested in cutting the canvas, a gesture that in the year 2000 could only be seen as a reference to Lucio Fontana. But how can you make something like that actually work? It is an interesting problem, to move beyond the seemingly overt reference—can the end result transcend its inauspicious beginnings? Accordingly, I put two darker pairings in the lower level along with two emo sculptures, and two brightly multi-colored paintings above with a more seemingly superficial sculpture.

I also installed carpet in the lower level in order to create a different aural space: muffled sound and no footsteps. I have done similar things in the past— covering lightbulbs with grey gels, or including sound components, subtle or otherwise, all in the service of creating theoretical and actual sensory changes to viewing more traditional paintings and sculptures. Important to note, in the sense of what this means to me specifically but also in terms of how an art show can engage in unrelated ideas at once—I have recently been thinking about this particular room, from when I was in school where I would experiment with setting up installations. I explored a lot of ideas in that room, installation and otherwise, some of which I am still working out today. It had a junky grey carpet that was in need of repair. I think that, like a sled, it is seeping into my unconscious somehow. To what end I am not sure.

A pretense gives the viewer something to latch onto going in. Often that something is an idea that precedes or describes a series of paintings. But my interest in painting was never about translating an idea into a group of works. There are ideas in my paintings, but they are secondary, or often I have thought of them as red herrings—really just doorways to help you into the room. In this way, the best thing about pretense is that it is exactly that, but hopefully one can move onto something deeper or more nuanced than that initial hook.

I should say here that I am a Gemini, and I should say too that Barbara was one as well. In fact, we were born on the same day. Geminis typically are all about conflicting personalities— they are moody, mercurial, etc. Since I am one, I can’t say exactly if I am this way to any extreme or if it is any different than any non-Gemini person who sometimes is annoyed and is sometimes laughing.