Enrico Riley

Enrico Riley’s (b. 1973, Westbury, CT) paintings investigate violence and hope in historical and contemporary cultural traditions in African American culture. The artist uses formal techniques to expose the limitations of linear narratives, including fractured bodies, hidden figures, ambiguous environments, and cropped frames. About his new body of work, Riley has stated, "I’m interested in the materiality of paint, the expressive potential of painted images and about issues around black identity and visibility."

As we have seen, Riley’s thugs are not pictured; they are hidden or lurking off canvas, represented only by the weapons they carry. He is even less forthcoming about whether his scenes refer to the specific recent episodes of violence enacted upon African American bodies in the United States. There may very well be echoes of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and Michael Brown in Evening, which appears to represent police violence, or Procession, with its suggestion of martyrdom. Riley has indicated that he is “interested in retiring to biblical narratives as a path to common on present day interpretations of the black body, and to communicate about the vulnerability and suffering of human beings today”. The alternation in this statement between the specific (“the black body”) and the universal (“human beings”) captures the ambiguous terrain mined by Riley’s powerful new work.

Riley is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Visual Arts, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize in Painting and holds the George Frederick Jewitt Professorship in Art at Dartmouth College. Riley has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the American Academy in Rome, the University of New Hampshire, and Jenkins Johnson Projects. He has participated in group exhibitions at State of the Art 2020 at Crystal Bridges Museum of Art and Black Bodies on the Cross at The Hood Museum. His work is in institutions including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Hood Museum, and Nasher Sculpture Center. Enrico Riley has an MFA in painting from Yale University and a BA in Visual Studies from Dartmouth College. Recent exhibitions include a solo at The University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities as well as Art Basel Miami Beach and at Rhythm in Time with Jenkins Johnson Gallery.