Michael Rich is pleased to announce his participation in the upcoming

Personal Structures 2022: Reflections

European Cultural Centre

23 April 2022 - 27 November 2022

Palazzo Bembo, Venice, Italy

Curatorial Team: Sara Danieli, Rachele De Stefano, Bérénice Freytag, Yuki Gómez Asami, Vittoria Mastrolilli, Lucia Pedrana, Claudia Piovan, Valeria Romagnini, Micaela Skerl, Suzanne van der Borg, Elena Volpato, Katerina Zachou

Invited by the European Cultural Centre, Italy to participate in the upcoming sixth exhibition of Personal Structures, American, contemporary, abstract artist, Michael Rich, presents his work in a place that has long inspired him, Venice. La Serenata (The Serenade) is a large-scale abstract painting inspired by the waters of Venice as it appears in the romantic paintings of the 19th century, giving the viewer a moment of respite and old-world romanticism amid the chaos of the current day.

Personal Structures will take place 23 April to 27 November, 2002 and is a 59th International Venice Biennale collateral event.

Michael is represented by Adler & Co. Gallery, Silicon Valley, CA

La Serenata

American painter, Michael Rich, explores the beauty of the landscape through an approach to abstract painting that is visceral, physical, and colorful.  Often working in a larger scale, his painting in many ways, is influenced by the American abstract painters of the 20th century.  Overt references to the sea, sky, weather, and light suggest an experience of landscape through a language of contemporary, gestural abstraction. Michael has traveled and studied extensively throughout Italy, including several trips to Venice over the years that has informed this latest, monumental work. 

Venice has provided inspiration to painters, writers, and musicians for ages as a place of ethereal and otherworldly beauty. Drawn to the otherworldly romanticism of the city, 19th and early 20th century painters, including JMW Turner, Claude Monet and John Singer Sargent, each made trips to Venice where they translated the architecture and watery world into sublime paintings.  Their works are romantic examples of color and light on the ever-present water and the daily lives of the Italians residents who live on and around that water.   

Consciously evoking these artists of a romantic past in his own work, La Serenata, Michael has chosen to pay homage in an abstraction inspired by the portrayal of the city on the water in the works of these artists.  Rich sees these artists not only as painters of beautiful landscapes but chroniclers of a period of social change and transformation.  Sargent’s watercolors were the specific reference for this large work through color and mark.  Moments of colorful brushwork found in Sargent’s paintings provided a structure and starting point.  The much-larger scale of this work, however, encompasses the whole body, requiring the artist to move about in this world of color.  The paintings of Michael Rich aim to speak about a personal relationship to the world around him through an experience of place through light and spirit that is embodied in the action and gesture of the artist.  He aims to discover intimacy in the grand scale of his painting.

Today, in the 21st century, Venice is under siege from the rising seas of climate change and now, like all of Italy, a global pandemic.  Inspired by the resilience of the city and the Italian people, La Serenata (the Serenade) takes its name from the many images coming to the world of Italians in quarantine singing with one another from their homes, opera singers and musicians performing on their balconies - examples of the resilience and the triumph of the human spirit in these most unsettling times.

Michael Rich

United States

The paintings of Michael Rich reflect an approach to nature and landscape as a means of spiritual investigation through the language of contemporary abstraction. Travels and study in Italy and a life spent around the waters of New England has helped to shape a love and interest in the natural rhythms of color that remain a focal point in his work today.  Michael Rich aims to discover poetic spaces of memory through painting that is visceral, physical and colorful. With an awareness of the opposing elements of nature’s serenity and tenacity, Rich investigates the harmony and irascibility of the natural world through opacity and translucency of color.  Places once visited, invented or discovered, vaguely take shape in the colors of space and light.

Educated at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Savannah College of Art and Design, Michael Rich lives and works in Providence, RI and is a Professor of Visual Arts at Roger Williams University. His work is featured in numerous, private and public collections nationally including, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY; Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA, the Springfield Museum of Art, Springfield, OH and the Smithsonian Institute, DC.

The European Cultural Centre

The European Cultural Centre is a cultural organization founded by the Dutch artist Rene Rietmeyer and originates back to 2002. Today, the ECC establishes cultural centres worldwide and is devoted to generating cultural exchange by organizing international art and architecture exhibitions, symposia and a wide range of cultural projects. Not only with Europeans but together with people from all around the world.

The goal of the ECC is to create awareness, to strengthen cultural commonalities and to learn about the qualities within our differences. The ECC believes that progress is best made by creating a deeper awareness about the serious challenges we all face today bringing people from different cultures together in the hope that all will learn from each other.

The ECC has organized and hosted over 50 contemporary art, design and architecture exhibitions worldwide - as well as hundreds of meetings, workshops, symposiums and other cultural events. Through teaching and research platforms (ECC-Academy and ECC-Performance Art) the ECC offers comprehensive educational programs for those who are sincerely interested in cultural exchange.

Palazzo Bembo

4793 Riva del Carbon, San Marco, Venice

Situated near the Rialto Bridge, Palazzo Bembo is characterized by a magnificent façade built in the Venetian Gothic style facing the Grand Canal. The palace itself was committed by the noble Bembo family in the 15th century. While the interior has been modified several times during the past centuries, the exterior still maintains its original appearance. Thanks to the collaboration between the current owner of the palace and the ECC, the palace revives its past glory and hosts, since 2011, high quality exhibitions in its two noble floors.

Links

Adler & Co. Gallery

ECC Italy - Personal Structures

La Biennale Arte 2022

Michael Rich Press Release