RIDGEFIELD, CONN.- The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is presenting Old, Odd, and Oval, the first solo museum exhibition in the United States by Chicago-born artist Ruth Root, from November 15, 2015, through April 3, 2016.
Root’s practice centers on an intensive investigation of color, material, form, and support. For more than two decades, she has worked within the language of abstract painting, exploring the physical and illusory boundary of wall and object, foreground and background, even inventing her own color wheel to challenge canonized color theory. Old, Odd, and Oval, part of the Painting in Four Takes series of exhibitions, focuses on her latest body of work, medium- to large-scale to site-engaged paintings that demonstrate her experimentations with new materials and fabrication methods as she combines hand-painted Plexiglas with colorful fabric patterns she designs digitally. Alongside these new works, The Aldrich presents an intimate salon-style hanging of Root’s painted paper collages, initiated in 1998, to demonstrate her advancing investigation of color, pattern, and composition as noted influencers of what was to come (evidenced by the new works in the adjacent galleries). These small, shaped, works on paper are geometric abstractions that feature quirky cartoonish elements to rupture color fields—madcap flourishes humanizing pure abstract reduction.
Ruth Root: Old, Odd, and Oval, organized by Aldrich curator Amy Smith-Stewart.
Ruth Root: Old, Odd, and Oval is part of Painting in Four Takes, a series of solo exhibitions that provide a window into the practices of four engaging painters who imbue the medium with relevance and character. In addition to Root, Steve DiBenedetto, Hayal Pozanti, and Julia Rommel are being featured. On view from November 15, 2015, through April 3, 2016, the exhibitions mark the first time in over twenty years that The Aldrich has dedicated all of its galleries to painting.
The last one hundred years have witnessed the explosion of virtually every available means and medium in the service of art making, yet painting has not only maintained a central position in visual art, but has also adapted creatively to rapid changes in our culture as a whole. Today, painting is embedded in the broad debate of actual vs. virtual, and its ability to balance what is illusive and what is real, what is tactile and what is optical, and what is emotive and what is formal, providing fertile ground for a diverse range of artists.
“While some point to marketability as the basis for the unwavering position of painting as a leading visual arts medium, for many artists, painting provides the most relevant platform for expression, allowing for both the potential of innovation and deep historical continuity,” says Richard Klein, The Aldrich’s exhibitions director.
Aldrich curator Amy Smith-Stewart explains, “The four artists selected span generations, methods, and intentions, but all are deeply entrenched in what painting is and can be in the image-dominated atmosphere of our twenty-first century.”
Ruth Root was born in Chicago in 1967 and works in New York City. Her work has been exhibited at Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; Maureen Paley gallery, London; Galerie Nikolaus Ruzicska, Salzburg, Austria; Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire; The Suburban, Oak Park, Illinois; MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York; ArtPace, San Antonio, Texas; LACMA, Los Angeles; and the Seattle Art Museum, among others.
