Rebecca Rich, (b. New York, 1971) graduated with a BA from Occidental College, in a combined studio program with Art Center College of Design, and received an MFA from Claremont. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles. 

Over the course of her career, Rebecca Rich has developed her own feminist language of abstraction, grounded in an ongoing conversation with the history of postwar American abstraction. Throughout her practice, abstraction becomes a space in which narrative exists without becoming representational and perception remains fluid. Across painting and time-based work, she uses abstraction to create conditions of reciprocity between the work and its viewer; what becomes available changes through movement, time, attention, and repetition. 

Working from within the language of painting, Rich engages its history while reconsidering some of the inheritance. She dismantles traditional hierarchies of color, material, and subject matter. Working on raw linen, she leaves the substrate exposed even within the density of accumulated layers. Rather than disappearing beneath the image, the linen remains visible and integral to it, marking the time of the painting’s making. Metallic paint creates reflective surfaces that shift with changing light and the movement of the viewer’s body. The paintings function as sculptural sundials, changing with the hour, season, and position from which they are viewed. As the body moves to the painting, the painting moves to the body: light as mechanism and medium.

Stains and marks interrupt the pull toward an all-over field, redirecting movement between center and edge without settling into a fixed view. Within that movement are active spaces to rest, pausing the eye without resolving the composition. Layers accumulate slowly, sometimes over years, as earlier marks recede and re-emerge through the painting. Working with concrete finishing tools, including magnesium floats, Rich claws back through the painted surface, exposing what lies beneath. Different moments in the painting’s making coexist, holding its accumulated time within a perpetual present.

In the language based works, the linguistic structure is composed before the physical making of the painting begins. Drawing from a compendium transcribed from nearly two decades of her recorded dreams, she edits out her individual presence and builds a distinct architecture of language for each. This structure is then printed directly onto the raw linen before it is stretched. Once painting begins, the text is subject to the same conditions of accumulation, erasure, scale, and composition as the painted marks; what can be read changes with repeated viewing. Another encounter can produce another reading. The space between reading and looking forms an abstract narrative that does not resolve itself. Language becomes image as image becomes language, remaining available to decipher—or not.

In the time-based work, the language changes medium. Dense linguistic compositions unfold through duration; language overlaps, recedes, and re-emerges, continually reorganizing what is read and seen. As the work moves, language can be followed or experienced as form; the eye can follow different paths through the composition. Repeated encounters make something entirely new available. These shifts invite the viewer to form their own abstract narrative within the language, creating relationships that remain in flux.

Across the work, movement, time, and attention continually shift perception, resisting a fixed position or singular read. A tension between containment and freedom creates a paradox in which defined limits become a condition for expansiveness. The work acts as a witness for the viewer, creating a continuous reciprocity that does not resolve itself.

Instagram: @rebeccarich_studio