Rebecca Rich

Rebecca Rich is a multi-disciplinary artist who’s practice includes painting, installation, video, performance and public projects. Born in New York, Rich 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. 

Her work navigates the terrain between image and language, Feminism and Surrealism, exploring themes of metamorphosis and intuition, confronting negation and dismantling hierarchies of color, material, and subject.  Her work explores the paradox of containment and freedom—the tension between firm boundaries and infinite internal space. This inquiry began almost simultaneously with her formal spiritual practice and dance training, rooted in a desire to access a sense of boundless openness within defined limits.

Painting functions as a site of investigation, where the work sits within a contained frame to explore expansiveness through both a centered and non-centered point of arrival. The relationship between center and edge is foundational to the work, as are moments of active stillness—resting places where perception can pause, settle, and expand. Through this, the work invites viewers to encounter themselves within their own limits while simultaneously opening into a vast, unknown field.

The visual language draws from abstraction, with texture, color, light, and composition serving as primary tools. Metallic surfaces act as both decoy and collaborator, interacting with sunlight to alternately reveal and conceal the image in response to the viewer’s body. These paintings function as sculptural sundial forms—humanoid, temporal, and in constant dialogue with light. They shift hourly, seasonally, and spatially, resisting a fixed or singular perspective and instead emerging through relational experience. Movement is central to the work both through the act of gesture, dance and the required act of moving around the work to access it fully. 

Dream imagery also informs the work, both explicitly and subtly, as a form of abstract narrative. Dreams are approached as an antechamber of hidden knowledge—a space where the psyche processes and integrates what remains unseen. In this way, the work draws on a shared, collective unconscious, offering layers for the viewer to uncover over time. Ultimately, the paintings act as witnesses and conduits, creating space for an embodied experience of self—held yet infinite, contained yet free. They offer the possibility of a quiet, expansive encounter: a transmission of energy, presence, and transformation.

Instagram: @rebeccarich_studio