Richard Aldrich - Under the Influence New York Thursday, September 20, 2012 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Oliver Kamm / 5BE Gallery, New York

  • Catalogue Essay

    What we take from this is an understanding of images as themes or characters in a novel—they are literary forms whose progression is long and drawn out, and the work exists in the cumulative presentation and transmutation of these forms as they are developed over time… It is not about the image but rather about the channels of history that the work travels through.

    (Richard Aldrich, “A Progression of Forms: Richard Aldrich on the Art of Daan van Golden”, Artforum, Summer 2012, p. 257)

    Since the beginning of his career, artist Richard Aldrich has employed the intellectual practice of appropriation to develop abstracted depictions of personal and environmental affections. His conflagration of pictorial elements is an original attempt to structure a wide array of philosophical ideas around interacting visual components. Utilizing gessoed panels, oil paint, and wax, Aldrich’s “painted collages” become an accumulation of allusions that communicate his own unique artistic message.

    In the present lot, Aldrich quotes one of his primary influences—Dutch artist Daan van Golden. The abstracted, wing-like forms symmetrically flanking each side of the pictorial plane are borrowed from a 1982 work by van Golden titled Blue Study After Matisse, which, in turn, is a reference to Matisse’s The Parakeet and the Siren from 1952. In Aldrich’s rendition, the wings test the idea of authorship as they make up an image that comprises various levels of originality. Through his reinterpretation, Aldrich pays homage to his artistic past and to his own creative agency. His work is a conceptual declaration of an artist’s unending power to render new ideas through the dedicated reworking of influences and history.

92

Untitled

2003
oil and wax on panel
16 x 12 in. (40.6 x 30.5 cm)
Signed, inscribed, and dated "2003 Rich Aldrich collage from Daan van Golden + can photo" on the reverse.

Estimate
$7,000 - 9,000 

Sold for $13,750

Under the Influence

20 September 2012
New York