The Abyss I (2024)

Richard Medina

36" x 72"

Acrylic and image transfer on panel

Abyss I is a self-portrait of the artist lying on the ocean floor. The painting is cut up into a loose grid, and is created from layers of wide-format inkjet image transfers and acrylic paint.

Alt-Text: Body lying on ground divided into a wavy grid.

Richard Medina is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. He has exhibited at Heaven Gallery, Union Street Gallery, Robert T. Wright Gallery, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. In 2016 Richard was awarded the Jeffrey Ahn, Jr. Fellowship. He served as the Biennial Committee Co-Chair for the nonprofit organization Terrain Exhibitions, and directed the Terrain Biennial 2019. He holds a BFA with Distinction from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2021) and is currently pursuing his MFA in Studio Art at New York University.

Artist Statement

I’m interested in belief, disbelief, and the space in between where most of us find ourselves.

Paranormal, spiritual, supernatural, and epistemological belief systems require a clear distinction between what is true and what isn’t true. But most of us are agnostic in some sense or another, picking and choosing what we believe in based on subjective experience.

I find it hard to believe in anything while seeing so much destruction and cruelty in the world. But I want to believe in something. I’m searching for it. My work grasps at similar strands: a yearning for order in a world of chaos, a sense of the sublime, of existential doubt, fear, and reverence. It also triggers cynicism, flippancy, careless disregard, and devil’s advocacy.

I use humor and a fragmentary approach to composition to present these themes in a disarming, contemporary context. I build up my paintings from layers of acrylic and large-format inkjet transfers, disrupting pictorial space and drawing in visual references to internet art and digital means of production. My subject matter is the unpaintable: desire, fear, horror, faith, and what remains when we lose it.