SF/Arts Curator Insight

SECA Award-winner (2022) Gregory Rick's solo show features a wide variety of works on paper, including "Long Summer," a fold-out artist book that becomes a mini-mural of multicolored creatures sprawling across a crowded landscape. Words pop out ("Do Something" "Burn Baby Burn") while characters sometimes playfully, sometimes aggressively intrude upon and overlap one another. By contrast, a collection of simple black marker drawings provides a sharper focus; one is a harpy (the mythical personification of storm winds), merging bird body with human head and suggesting a feathered Vladimir Putin. Show highlight "Bacchus Returns From War" has the feel of a drunken parade. Floating on colorfully mottled hand-made paper, it's as delicate and hallucinatory as a hangover. Rick originally learned to draw by copying military illustrations from WWII encyclopedias. War and politics, alongside the gymnastics of modern existence, remain the subjects of his art.