Edward Rice

Artist’s Statement

My work is art of the present that references art of the past.

Biography

The exhibition features rarely seen figure paintings created by Rice over the past decade. These works reflect the artist’s lifelong interest in the history of the depiction of the human figure, drawing on diverse references from ancient art, to 19th century folk art.

Edward Rice was born in 1953 in Augusta, GA and raised in North Augusta, SC. He was protégé of Freeman Schoolcraft from 1972-1979 and Director / Artist in Residence at the Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art, Augusta from 1979-1982. The artist is the recipient of a South Carolina Arts Commission Artist Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts / Southern Arts Federation Regional Fellowship, and the Elizabeth O’Neil Verner Governor’s Award.

His paintings have been included in exhibitions at Babcock Galleries, New York; Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe; Heath Gallery, Atlanta; among numerous others. Public collections include the Gibbes Museum of Art, the Columbia Museum of Art, the South Carolina State Museum, the Greenville County Museum of Art, the Georgia Museum of Art, the Morris Museum of Art, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

Accolades

“ … fine and mature …”
Ivan Karp
OK Harris Gallery
New York, NY

“These images haunt the imagination …”
Kevin Grogan
Director, Morris Museum of Art
Augusta, GA

“ Rice has the ambition to create art of the first order … “
Peter Morrin
Former Curator of Contemporary Art
High Museum of Art
Atlanta GA

“ … a fine sense of scale, of design, and color.”
Nicolai Cikovsky
Former Curator of American Art
National Gallery of Art
Washington, D.C.

“The varietal range that the artist sucks out of a single subject is remarkable.”
Dan Cameron
Independent Curator
New York NY

“For more than three decades, Edward Rice has produced art on a level arguably unparalleled in South Carolina.”
Wim Roef
Former Director 701 Center for Contemporary Art
Columbia, SC

“They seem, in their solidity and simplicity, deeply American, while their references are indebted to ancient cultic traditions.”
Eleanor Heartney
Art Critic and Writer
New York NY

“ Informed by the continued absorption of outside influences, yet following his own self motivated path, Rice’s work matured during the reemergence of a vigorous school of American realist painting. Although the development of the new realism made the critical climate more receptive to realist painting, Rice’s anachronistic realism was largely untouched by the conceptual elements of late modern art; it also lacked the irony, revivalism and media consciousness associated with Postmodernism.”
David Houston
Former Chief Curator
Ogden Museum of Southern Art
New Orleans, LA

Related URL

www.edwardriceart.com

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