Create! Magazine is pleased to share the announcement of two concurrent solo artist exhibitions featuring Matt Rich and Victoria Fu on view from Nov. 6, 2021 to Jan. 1, 2022 at Halsey McKay Gallery. 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.

And And And, Rich’s third solo show with Halsey McKay, installed on the ground floor of the gallery, continues his ongoing play with the ideas of supports and surfaces, objecthood and observation, flatness and relief, abstraction, and recognizability. Taking the stretcher bar out of the equation, Rich’s cut canvas pieces are assembled piece-by-piece into larger, constructed compositions. He has referred to his practice as having a “flawed clarity," capturing the teetering—sometimes tense exchange—between painterly effect and precise construction.

Rich’s not-quite flat paintings unsettle, revel in, and trample surfaces—their own as well as the gallery’s hard walls. Rich endows his paintings with an array of techniques that complicate their experience and presentation. Slicing, rippling, looping, and wrinkling his works, Rich creates “surplus surfaces”—which cast undulating shadows under the lights of the gallery, part of an extending network of spatial, material engagements. Exploring the use of materials as foils to the traditional painting process, Rich’s paintings free the weight and flow of color and the tautness of forms into our surroundings.

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 the recognizable figure of the ampersand. Rooted down in this familiar form, the works seem to reach out to something beyond. Rich’s sinuous rendering of the ampersand and its “and” meaning suggest an open-ended sense of connection and extension.

In Fu’s first exhibition with Halsey McKay, installed in the upstairs gallery, the eponymous exhibition pairs a large printed silk curtain, part of an ongoing body of work by the artist, with a suite of new photographs. Arranged in this grouping, the works refer to our now common practice of touching and living with layers of screens—depicting colorful desktops, illuminated gradient windows, and long, trailing marks.

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 doing so, Fu references both our lived and virtual surroundings, our lives immediately in and infinitely beyond the gallery.

A centerpiece of sorts, Fu’s Curtain 3 likewise occupies many positions at once: a screen, a photograph and a functional art object. Its depiction of a desktop references our expanding haptic engagement—with both the flat world of computer and touchscreen interfaces and the surfaces of lush textiles. The photographs, in turn, explore the perspectives and feelings of touch, as reimagined in the contemporary digital age. Together, the works are a many-leveled reflection on living with screens and the lives of images.

About the artists:

Matt Rich (b. 1976) is a painter who received an 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.

More about the gallery:

Halsey McKay Gallery (79a Newtown Lane, East Hampton, N.Y.) was founded in 2011 with the goal to bring inspired contemporary art to East Hampton, N.Y. From the first exhibition, Halsey McKay Gallery has presented an eclectic and experimental range of international artists and programming. The gallery represents emerging and mid-career artists and participates extensively in art fairs. Halsey McKay regularly collaborates with curators, gallerists, and artists beyond the roster for on and off-site exhibitions. Halsey McKay is owned and directed by artist Ryan Wallace and is a member of the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA).