Gregory Rick
Active Shooter at Our Baptism
Hair and Nails, 39 Henry Street, New York
by William Corwin, January 11, 2025
Image: Gregory Rick, Harrowing of Hell, 2024
The pacific and gentle face of Harriet Tubman is what will jump out at the viewer in Gregory Ricks painting exhibition Active Shooter at Our Baptism, when standing in the compact and brim-filled space of Hair and Nails; a gallery recently arrived from Minneapolis on the Lower East Side. It is not Harriet Tubman exactly, but a Tubman transmogrified into the Virgin Mary; Based on the iconic Lindlsey photograph (1871-76), Rick has smoothed out the years in Tubman’s face, retained part of her stance, and depicts her placidly giving birth to an infant. The infant is labeled “I.N.R.I.,” thus designating him as the Messiah. Around the mother-and-child pair in this painting Birth of the Messiah (2024), screaming soldiers, deaths-heads, and reptilian monsters swirl frenetically. It’s ok to take a breath looking at Ricks cataclysmic canvasses: they are meant to startle and disarm, and then convey you into a blissful state of awareness. The triumvirate of large works in the show, Birth of the Messiah, Harrowing of Hell (2024), and Uprising Goddess (2023), all play with symphonic compositions of jumble and chaos, but with a moment of respite. James Ensor’s grim yet cheery masquerades come to mind, but even more fitting are Hieronymus Bosch’s numerous Ecce Homo depictions of Christ.
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Ricks painting practice cuts to the heart of narrative painting—he depicts people in movement, in action: something is happening. There is an amplification of the energy of everyday activity, again this is what narrative painting is for—we know that for the most part life moves at a banal pace presenting us with the familiar, not the extraordinary. Still, to make a story, Rick adds that extra level of speed, violence, or simply emotion. In Harrowing of Hell, four figures dramatically toss their arms up and in front of them, in pain and fear as they roast in eternal hellfire, on the left a calm observer stands with his hands at his hips, perhaps a savior. In Untitled (with Tiger) (2024), a hulking man in a white t-shirt is positioned in close quarters to a curling recumbent feline. The man and tiger’s faces form a diagonal dialog across the canvas, he seems angry, and the cat seems playful. Rick has laminated sheet music onto the background, the piano score of Frére Jacques, insisting on a subtext, on a narrative. Again we are reminded that something important is happening.
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Gregory Rick, Untitled (with Tiger), 2024
Gregory Rick, Untitled, 2024
In many works in the exhibition, Untitled (with Tiger), Abraham 2 (2024), Quick Exchange (2023), among others, Rick plays with the idea of the autodidactic artist, a seminal figure in African American painting traditions. The frenzied figures rendered outside of perspective reference Bill Traylor, who was a master of presenting lively and deeply emotive narrative scenes without traditional Western art school training. In Untitled (2024), a small work on paper inscribed with the words “a long time;” a small swaddled corpse is placed in equal height to a simply rendered institutional edifice—the blank eyes of the figure mirrored in the staccato blue brushstrokes of the building—neither realistic nor abstract, but convincing. Rick uses the autodidact-style as a tool for harnessing the energy of a scene, but he’ll turn the tables on a dime and show the viewer marvelous realistic portraits as with Tubman in Birth of the Messiah, or out-of-left-field personages such as Shah Reza Pahlavi in Kermit Coup (Long Live Mossadegh) (2024), or in wittier expressionistic portraits, as in Friends (2024).
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And then there is Batman—encapsulating the kind of BANG, WHAM, and SMASH comic book energy in Ricks’ canvasses. The Caped Crusader appears frequently in Ricks’ paintings, both as himself, and perhaps an avatar for the artist, and also as a cautionary tale. In Untitled (2024), Rick revisits his Harrowing of Hell theme, depicting the traditional medieval image of tortured souls writhing in the mouth of a giant demon. In the large painting—Harrowing of Hell—in this exhibition, the artist keeps the features of the demon quite nondescript, but in Untitled, we can see that it very well might be Batman. As chaotic as the action in Ricks’ canvases may seem, it is for the most part circular, and by linking the works in Active Shooter at Our Baptism together, we can see the artist brilliantly bringing it all back to himself.
Gregory Rick, Birth of the Messiah, 2024