DANIEL RICH

"The city is full of structures that we live close to without any real access to what goes on inside them — commerce, governance, whatever quiet machinery keeps a tower lit at 2 a.m., and Rich’s paintings sit in that gap, imagining a kind of parallel universe running alongside our own, visible only as surface. You go to the grocery store on the ground floor. Somewhere above you, on a floor you’ll never see, something else entirely is happening, and it is, in its own way, running your life, too."

- Evan Pricco in "What Happens on the Twenty-Third Floor: On the New Paintings of Daniel Rich"

"New York holds a specific place in all of this, distinct from the other cities and structures that have run through Rich’s work over the years. He lived in New York for a long time before Berlin and before North Carolina, and he still thinks of it as something closer to a portal than to a place: the city that has absorbed generation after generation of people arriving to start over, his own family included. It is also, he has noticed, a city that seals its residents into their own version of the world. Live in Manhattan long enough, and the rest of the country starts to feel like a separate track entirely. Live in Brooklyn, and Midtown can start to feel like another universe, twenty minutes and a bridge away."

- Evan Pricco in "What Happens on the Twenty-Third Floor: On the New Paintings of Daniel Rich"

"The buildings are rendered with a precision so exacting that it borders on obsession: every window, every setback, every cornice accounted for, traced and cut, stenciled and filled until nothing is left to chance. And yet nothing moves. There are no cars, no crowds, no single figure crossing a plaza or looking out from behind a glass window."

- Evan Pricco in "What Happens on the Twenty-Third Floor: On the New Paintings of Daniel Rich"