Bonnie Rychlak
at the Bridgehampton Museum
By Saul Ostrow, August 11, 2026
Donald Judd, in the early years of Minimalism, would likely have included the works in this exhibition by Bonnie Rychlak at the Bridgehampton Museum within his category of “Specific Objects” (1964): works that were neither painting nor sculpture, but asserted a literal presence in the viewer’s space. Yet the more accessible term Minimalism, which retained painting and sculpture as categories while treating reductivism as a brute fact, came to dominate critical and art-historical discourse in the 1970s, largely displacing both the categorical and conceptual problem of specificity that Judd’s term named. What has not disappeared is the problem of how painting and sculpture remain distinct practices even after the historical criteria that once separated them no longer hold with confidence. This unresolved relation is made especially visible in the present exhibition, which gathers the same works Rychlak previously showed at Catskill Art Space in Livingston Manor, from August 30 to October 25, 2025. Situated within a different architectural and curatorial economy, their relation to scale, sequencing, and the institution’s conditions of display produces another perceptual field.
Viewers who did not see the earlier exhibition will not register these differences in the same way; for those who did, reinstallation becomes one of the means through which Rychlak’s central concerns are clarified. Unlike works for which a change of venue merely alters reception, Rychlak’s wall works incorporate the conditions of their own display. Their negotiation between wall, surface, projection, and bodily address is not simply the means through which they are exhibited but part of their content. Reinstallation does not impose a new meaning; it becomes another articulation of how these works negotiate the relation between image, object, event, and architectural space.
Although Rychlak’s broader practice includes installations, sculptural objects, and textured glass constructions containing photographic imagery drawn from domestic and urban motifs, these wall works focus on a recurring concern within her practice: the relation between image, object, and event. Limiting the exhibition to this body of work concentrates attention on that problem rather than surveying the range of forms through which she has pursued it. The recurrence of forms, materials, and structural decisions reveals not a formula but a set of relations through which each work can be understood in relation to the others, each clarifying the terms of the next. Specificity is not a once-and-for-all given but is constantly renegotiated through form and presentation.
It is important to note that these works neither appeal to a neo-modernist formalism of medium specificity nor submit to the familiar post-medium claim that distinctions among media have made formal concerns irrelevant. Yet Rychlak indicates what is specific to each without pretending that this separation is natural or metaphysically given. The wall continues to signify painting; projection into space continues to invoke sculpture. Sculpture borrows painting’s skin, its attention to surface, opacity, and accumulated touch; painting acquires literal thickness, weight, and bodily occupation. Each work occupies both conditions without allowing to subordinate the other. Neither disappears into the other. Their difference persists because neither can absorb the operations of the other.
Although Rychlak’s broader practice includes installations, sculptural objects, and textured glass constructions containing photographic imagery drawn from domestic and urban motifs, these wall works focus on the relation between image, object, and event. Limiting the exhibition to this body of work concentrates attention on that relation rather than surveying the range of forms through which she has pursued it. The recurrence of forms, materials, and structural decisions reveals not a formula but a set of relations through which each work clarifies the terms of the next. Specificity is contingent, not a once-and-for-all given, but something constantly renegotiated.
These works are neither reliefs nor shaped paintings in any settled sense. Each occupies the wall as painting traditionally has yet refuses the wall’s authority to determine what kind of object it is. The body registers them as objects while their wall-based presentation invokes painting. This tension is reinforced by their placement below the conventional height of painting. Hung low, below eye level, they interrupt the habitual relation between viewer and painting, requiring the body to register their material presence rather than encountering them solely as image. By bringing the works downward from the expected field of address and into the viewer’s bodily space, their placement makes the relation between painting and objecthood physical as well as conceptual problem. The resulting indeterminacy, which is not only structural but material, does not resolve the relation between painting and sculpture; it maintains the tension through which neither practice can fully define the other. As Judd suggested, such works occupies a third category, whose identity derives from its presence as an object in real space.
The dome-like forms Rychlak makes consist of padded tapestry or fabric stretched across a wooden support, with occasional hardware serving structural and decorative ends refuse both the rigidity usually associated with sculpture and the elasticity of stretched canvas. Encaustic wax thickens and seals the fabric surface, producing a translucent skin that is at once soft, rigid, filmy, smooth, and unstable. It binds disparate elements and discourses into a singular form while retaining the associations her materials and forms carry. The resulting form is simultaneously swollen and compressed, tactile and resistant. In this synthesis, Rychlak does not resolve the problems of specificity and contingency but gives material form to their persistence.
Returning to Judd, his use of industrial materials—anodized aluminum, polished brass, painted steel—suggests a commitment to durability and impersonality that nonetheless remains vulnerable to time: polished surfaces tarnish, are marred by fingerprints, metals oxidize and finishes scratch. Rather than suppressing vulnerability beneath the appearance of permanence, Rychlak makes it the condition of the work through material choices. Judd’s work is machine-like, hard-edged, and industrially impersonal; Rychlak’s is tactile, mutable, and materially vulnerable. This evokes different networks of analogy—in Rychlak’s case, those of domesticity, gender, decorative excess, colonial appropriation, and bodily vulnerability—from which associative narratives emerge. These analogies function not as fixed references but as interpretive registers through which the very conditions Judd’s industrial aesthetic sought to bracket from art—metaphor, transience, composition, and bodily vulnerability—re-enter the work. Through these registers, Rychlak’s works become sites where social memory and aesthetic experience overwrite one another.