Exhibition Feature - AND AND AND + VICTORIA FU

Halsey McKay Gallery (79a Newtown Lane, East Hampton, N.Y.) is pleased to present two concurrent solo artist exhibitions featuring Matt Rich and Victoria Fu on view until Jan. 1, 2022. Rich’s exhibition, And And And, includes a series of new stretcher-less paintings. Fu’s self-titled show, Victoria Fu, pairs a new suite of photographs with a large, printed silk curtain.

GALLERY STATEMENT - And And And, Matt Rich’s third solo show with Halsey McKay, continues the artist’s ongoing play with the ideas of supports and surfaces, objecthood and observation, flatness and relief, abstraction and recognizability. His not-quite flat paintings unsettle, revel in and trample surfaces. This is part of Rich’s ongoing interest in generating an extending network of spatial, material engagements. Exploring the use of materials as foils to the traditional painting process, Rich’s work frees the weight and flow of color and the tautness of forms into our surroundings.

Victoria Fu’s self-titled exhibition, her first with the gallery, offers a many-leveled reflection on living with screens and the lives of images. Examining our mediated relationships to the digital world and its spaces, Fu’s work typically begins from technical images created with lens-based cameras, which Fu then manipulates and arranges, proceeding with a painterly sense of color and space. 

In the end, they are separate shows, striking for their particular approaches to notions of abstraction. 

And And And:

Arrow Ampersand, 2021 - Acrylic on canvas and linen, 53.5 x 42 inches (135.9 x 106.7 cm)

Flag, 2021 - Acrylic on canvas and linen, 36 x 49 inches (91.4 x 124.5 cm)

Yellow Cap, 2021 - Acrylic on canvas, 34.5 x 42 inches (87.6 x 106.7 cm)

Thoughts on And And And by Matt Rich:

In this show, there are five works that directly reference the symbol of the ampersand—it is intact and readable in these compositions. The works perform like paintings, with colors and lines and space, but also as language with meaning. In that sense, the run of paintings around the room—all sharing a midpoint—makes the show a sentence; a long, run-on sentence that continues on and on and on, looping the space and never bringing the viewer to an end or conclusion, just a perpetual re-reading.

There are three other pieces that more or less evolved from or reference the ampersand. Arrow Ampersand, has the two loops with interior voids that match a basic ampersand form but folds the extending legs back onto itself. Flag redistributes the central crossing "X" form, the outfacing "V" form and the enclosed interior forms of the ampersand across a geometric grid. Yellow Cap, the piece that least resembles the form of the ampersand, has a round, figure-head top and looping, overlapping bars underneath that share an elemental visual logic. Each of these three pieces suggest alternative forms for the symbol of the ampersand while embodying its meaning in the very act of assembling, editing, reforming, remaking or hijacking the original.

Backward Blue Ampersand, 2021 - Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 33 inches (61 x 83.8 cm)

Red Leg, 2021 - Acrylic on canvas, 57 x 37.5 inches (144.8 x 95.3 cm)

Ten Dots, 2021 - Acrylic on canvas and linen, 18 x 13 inches (45.7 x 33 cm)

Thoughts on Victoria Fu by Victoria Fu:

My studio practice focuses on our mediated relationships to the digital world and its spaces through screens. I typically make video installations that often include photographs and sculpture.

This show at Halsey McKay includes a large printed silk curtain and a suite of photographs that reference our practice of touching screens. The double-sided, dyed curtain is screen-like, object-like, and sign-like, all at once. I chose the material for its shimmering quality of its surface that echoes a screen’s pixilation and calls attention to its surface, a texture that is inviting to our sense of touch. It depicts a silhouetted hand holding a crystal prism, the resulting refractions of light against the shared backdrop of a flattened, cutout shape of color. The lightjet prints show marks made by a finger on a touchscreen, gesture drawings layered in film grain and desktop windows.

Curtain 3, 2020 - Dye-printed silk, 100 x 205 inches (254 x 520.7 cm)

OK, 2021 - Archival lightjet print, 11 x 20 inches (27.9 x 50.8 cm)

Q, 2021 - Archival lightjet print, 13 x 20 inches (33 x 50.8 cm)

Squiggles, 2021 - Archival lightjet print - 13 x 20 inches (33 x 50.8 cm)

And And And and Victoria Fu will be on display until January 1, 2022 at Halsey McKay Gallery.

Introduction and all images courtesy of the artists and Halsey McKay Gallery.

Check out our coverage of other current and recent art exhibitions

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES:

Matt Rich (b. 1976) is a painter who received a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a BA from Brown University and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Recent solo exhibitions include J A Zed Zed at Devening Projects and Editions, Chicago; Victoria Fu and Matt Rich: Monster A. at Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, Calif. and Versify at Halsey McKay Gallery/56HENRY, New York. Rich’s work has been featured in exhibitions in venues such as the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Project Row Houses, Houston; Samson Projects, Boston; Zevitas/Marcus, Los Angeles; galerie oqbo, Berlin and BravinLee Programs, New York City. His works are in the permanent collections of List Visual Arts Center at MIT, Cambridge, Mass.; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Mo.; Dana Farber Cancer Institute Art Collection, Boston and Northeastern University, Boston. His work has been written about in publications including Modern Painters, Artforum, Art Papers and The Boston Globe, among others. Rich lives and works in San Diego, where he is Associate Professor of Art at the University of San Diego.

Victoria Fu (b. 1978) is a visual artist who received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts, MA in Art History/Museum Studies from the University of Southern California and BA from Stanford University. She attended the Whitney Independent Study Program and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Fu was a recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship. Recent solo exhibitions include Victoria Fu at DOCUMENT, Chicago; Victoria Fu and Matt Rich: Monster A. at Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, Calif.; Victoria Fu, a Deutsche Bank Lounge Commission at Frieze LA, Paramount Theater Lobby, Los Angeles and Out of the Pale at Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, Ariz. Fu’s work was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and has been featured in exhibitions at the Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego; 52nd and 53rd New York Film Festivals, New York and IX Nicaragua Biennial, Managua, Nicaragua, among others. Her works are included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; Pérez Art Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Mass. and Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. She lives and works in San Diego, where she is Associate Professor of Art at the University of San Diego.