Miles McEnery Gallery is delighted to announce Flat Earth, an exhibition of recent work by Daniel Rich. The artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery will open on 8 December 2022 at 525 West 22nd Street and will remain on view through 28 January 2023. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by Wells Fray-Smith.

Daniel Rich paints angular, geometric architectures of modernist buildings in Midtown Manhattan in this new body of work. His process begins with screenshots from Google Street View and his own photographs, which are scaled up and realized in brightly colored acrylic paint on panel.

The scale and perspective of the paintings draw the viewer to a place of tension between the specific and the ubiquitous, the individual and the anonymous, the surveilled and the surveyor. The distortion and cropping of the compositions thrust the viewer into the vantage point of a protestor, demonstrator, or parade marcher on the street.

In this unique contemporary moment, when anything could happen next, ordinary street views and buildings toe a tense line between banal and significant. In his newest body of work, Rich expands on his decades-long investigation into the ways architecture bears witness to, reflects, and suggests underlying political narratives.

“In referring to the artifice of painting while invoking real-life politics, the Flat Earth paintings operate as clever devices in which life and art map onto one another and become self-referential,” writes Fray-Smith, “Life, like painting, these works suggest, is a series of constructions in which there is no truth. Both are, after all, a matter of perspective.”