Halsey McKay Gallery is pleased to present P&!nting, Matt Rich’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. Building on two recent institutional exhibitions, Rich continues to needle at what defines Painting, with ideas of supports and surfaces, objecthood and observation, flatness and relief, abstraction and recognizability.

Painting as, the title of Rich’s February 2024 exhibition at Southwestern College Art Gallery, is a call to explore the extended reach of the discipline of painting–a career-long goal that is now reaching fever pitch. Painting As is a formula for the medium’s constant reinvention: painting as this, painting as that, etc. His 2023 exhibition at the Timken Museum of Art in San Diego’s Balboa Park, also titled P&!nting included an installation of institutional interventions inserted Rich’s paintings into the collection galleries in direct, intimate exchange with paintings from the Renaissance and Rococo periods. For this project, his paintings occupied a series of alternate, adjacent or supporting areas: painting-as-wall, painting-as-pedestal, painting-as-in-between.

For P&!nting, Rich has produced a set of new paintings that further develop the possibility for painting as a broad, loose set of material, conceptual, and experiential parameters. Velcro tabs hold back flaps; black rolled paint seeps through the pixelated pores of thin muslin fabric; a thick layer of luscious phthalo blue oil paint radiates a purple sheen; painted pink nylon string pulls back doors to reveal a peek-a-boo cut out. While his main language and approach remains that of color-based abstraction using basic geometric shapes, several of Rich’s paintings venture out to incorporate recognizable forms like figure eights, ampersands, or vases.

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, P&!nting, Timken Musuem of Art, San Diego, CA; Painting as, Southwestern College Art Gallery, Chula Vista, CA; 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, CA; and Versify at Halsey McKay Gallery, 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. He is a 2019 recipient of a Howard Foundation Fellowship. Rich lives and works in San Diego, where he is Associate Professor of Art at the University of San Diego.