Richard Aldrich

Modern Art Paris is delighted to present Richard Aldrich's fourth exhibition with the gallery, his first solo presentation in Paris.

Aldrich's exhibition at Place de l'Alma, L'Orange, comprises a selection of recent paintings alongside sculpture and installation. His paintings, often considered over long periods of time, hold the fleeting place of one's immediate present, suspending our attention and recharging it as spectral and elusive. Aldrich's paintings appear as physical placeholders of the temporary and contingent, of how touch or sensation might be reencountered in one's memory. In this selection of works, colours appear to reach upwards, move and buckle as they strike contact; a nestling of realities that appear at times jubilant, ecstatic. Aldrich's expansive relation to colour is also found in the final room, where the titular colour appears in the vivid orange felt floor that he views as a ‘sort of psychological state of calm or ecstasy'.

In other works, objects and found materials cling to the surface of the support, where patterns and associations emerge in fragmentary ways. Works appear as double exposures of time and space, in which Aldrich redescribes the familiar; the lived as anew. Amongst this complex array of personal and visual associations, Aldrich's work instils a sense of the porosity not only of the material world as encountered, but also of its perceived cohesion, which is swept away to reveal something closer to the way our constantly evolving sense of the world might be. As the artist once observed, ‘What is important is that the work sets up a sort of stage in which the viewer is responsible for navigating themselves around. The paintings are presented, but they become these mirrors that flip back and forth between reflecting myself and reflecting the viewer'.

The exhibition also marks the launch of a major new monograph published by Hatje Cantz; the most comprehensive account of Aldrich's practice to date, bringing together new scholarship on one of the most important artists working today.

Richard Aldrich was born in 1975 in Hampton, VA, and lives and works in New York, NY. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Auroras, São Paulo (2026), Modern Art, London (2024), Gladstone, New York (2023); Fondazione Giuliani, Rome (2022); Modern Art, London (2021); Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle (2016); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2011); and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2011). He has participated in recent group exhibitions at Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill (2023) the Museum of Contemporary Art, Busan (2022); the National Museum of Art, Osaka (2019); Aïshti Foundation, Beirut (2018); and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2018). 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; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan; and ICA Miami.