Rico Gatson
Selected Works
Untitled (Astral Black I), 2024, Acrylic paint and glitter on wood, 36 x 80 inches, 91.4 x 203.2 cm, MMG#36974
Press Release
NEW YORK — Miles McEnery Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of recent works by Rico Gatson, Above and Below. The artist’s third solo exhibition at the gallery will open on 5 September 2024 and remain on view through 26 October 2024 at 511 West 22nd Street. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by Erica Cardwell.
Rico Gatson’s newest body of work invites viewers into a world where vibrant colors and meticulously rendered forms converge. The result is a visual symphony, which delights and challenges the senses. The works draw from Op art and geometric abstraction, where simple shapes seem to move before your eyes, oscillating between background and foreground.
With slow and patient observation, Gatson’s paintings come alive; the overlapping forms are not just colors merging but distinct entities in a relationship, influencing and reacting to one another as if they were sentient beings in constant interaction. Through pyramids, rays, and concentric circles infused with glitter and bursts of bright color, Gatson creates a visual language that bridges the cosmic and the cultural, reclaiming and empowering these historic motifs.
Erica Cardwell writes, “For Gatson, his career has centered around elevating Black iconography to a place of purposeful and intentional homage. Above and Below touches more specifically on the relationship that such reverie can have on the psyche of the viewer, how it can heal us.”
RICO GATSON (b. 1966 in Augusta, GA) received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Bethel College in 1989 and his Master of Fine Arts from Yale School of Art in 1991.
Gatson has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at the Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA; USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL; Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; Children’s Museum of the Arts, New York, NY; Metropolitan Transportation Authority, New York, NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; the Wright Museum of Art, Beloit College, Beloit, WI; to name just a few.
His work has been included in group exhibitions at numerous international institutions including the Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit, MI; Denver Art Museum, CO; Essl Museum, Vienna, Austria; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY; Santa Monica Museum of Art, CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; La Vieille Charité, Marseille, France; and elsewhere.
His work may be found in the collections of the Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville, TN; Denver Art Museum, CO; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Malcolm X Institute, Wabash College, Crawfordsville, IN; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, MN; National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; among others.
He is the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award for Visual Artists; Prized Pieces Video Award from the National Black Programming Consortium; Oil Bar Ltd. Award for Excellence in Sculpture from Yale School of Art; and The Pew Charitable Trusts Graduate Fellowship.
Gatson lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.