SIDE EFFECTS; paintings by Bruce Riley
Eyeporium Gallery, Chicago
1/22/2011 – 3/30/2011

Bruce Riley's new paintings are rich creations that seduce the viewer into a visual world of exploration. With a singular approach to mark-making Mr. Riley paints in layers suspended between thick, transparent glazes that result in new works that collect light and glow with a luminous sensuality that needs no explanation.

"For this exhibition I've brought together two bodies of work separated by roughly twenty years. I'm very excited to be developing a new direction in my painting, so when Eye Want asked me to put together a last-minute show, I took the opportunity to juxtapose four new pieces with older work of a similar feel.

 

The recent paintings in the exhibition are decidedly figurative with a psychedelic, organic funk about them. These paintings are process-driven, relying on chance and accident as much as intent. The technique can best be described as a gentle corralling or urging of chemical interactions. I pretty much paint for myself but if the viewers were to forget themselves while looking at these pieces, they would be as close as one can get to an understandable meaning.

 

The older paintings in the show are also process-driven. This body of work took shape when I started to use the paint scraped from a palette at the end of a day's work. The excitement of spontaneously working with palette knives soon took over all I was doing for awhile. Both of these bodies of work use technique in a very idiosyncratic manner."




Bruce Riley 2010
Miller Gallery, Cincinnati, OH
June 11th - 25th

" I'm absolutely blown away by your work!  I stood before a made thing that was not as if made but moved as if it organically grew from a small cluster (glob) of paint.  Growth, organic movement.  I got the same feeling as when , years ago, I came around a corner in Barcelona, and Gaudi's incredible Sagrada Famiglia was suddenly there growing out of the earth like a nucleus of mushrooms that outgrew their mushroomness to become, in Gaudi's making, a Cathedral.  This showing at the Miller Galery hit me like that, as if you've learned from every direction your art has taken you -- even the mistakes -- to now with sure hand let something emerge as seemingly spontaneously as it is carefully and meticulously executed.  Bravo! "
Murray Bodo, Franciscan and author of  Mystics: Ten Who Show Us the Ways of God

Beneath the Surface
Paintings by Bruce Riley and Jason Zickler
June 24th - July 31st
BlackBird Gallery
Chicago, IL 60640

Hyperbolic Identities - In Ex Voto

6 visiting artists from Chicago and Indianapolis
Kyle Blevins   photographer   Chicago
Elke Claus   rrintmaker   Chicago
Marianna Levant   painter   Chicago
Kelly McKaig   photographer   Chicago
Bruce Riley   painter   Chicago
Doug Travis   photographer Indianapolis
    July through August 2010
    opening reception, Friday, July 2nd, 5pm
    music curated by Black Rabbit Moon
    Gallery Ex Voto
    634 East Market Street, Louisville, KY 40202    502-271-0091
    www.galleryexvoto.com


Twenty Years / Twenty Artists
The exhibition celebrates the City of Cincinnati's Individual Artist Grant Program
and will recognize twenty visual artists who received grants during the first
twenty years of the grant program.
    August 6th - September 3rd
    reception, August 27th
    Art Academy of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45202    513-562-6262