Exhibitions at the Scales Fine Arts Center/ WFU

Ed Rice Exhibition: Hanes Art Gallery, Scales Fine Arts Center, WFU

This exhibit features the precisely rendered paintings of architectural subjects for which the artist is known in the Southeastern US. The paint handling, scale and specificity of detail in these works give them a tremendous presence, but they are also about the limits of realism and painterly mimesis. Rice’s work in this selection comprises painting that span a range of approaches, including the non-objective. All of them project a strong sense of the hieratic; symmetrical, formal and often regally aloof.

Edward Rice, b.1953 is a past recipient of a South Carolina Arts Commission Artist Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts / Southern Arts Federation Regional Fellowship. His paintings have been included in exhibitions at Babcock Galleries, New York, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, Heath Gallery, Atlanta, among others. His work is included in the collections of the Gibbes Museum of Art, the Columbia Museum of Art, the South Carolina State Museum, the Greenville County Museum of Art, the Georgia Museum of Art, the Morris Museum of Art and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

“The architectural paintings of Edward Rice are carefully rendered evocations of place, born of close familiarity and intense study,” says David Houston, Chief Curator, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA. “Informed by the continued absorption of outside influences, yet following his own self motivated path, Rice’s work matured during the reemergence of a vigorous school of American realist painting. Although the development of the new realism made the critical climate more receptive to realist painting, Rice’s anachronistic realism was largely untouched by the conceptual element of late modern art; it also lacked the irony, revivalism and media consciousness associated with Postmodernism.”

The hours at the Hanes Art Gallery are: Mon.-Fri., 10am-5pm and Sat. & Sun., 1-5pm, except during university holidays.

For further information call Paul Bright at 336/758-5585 or e-mail at (brightpb@wfu.edu). To see more of Edward Rice’s works visit (http://www.edwardriceart.com/).

Mezzanine Gallery
Los Sueños: Prints of Goya, Mirò, and Picasso
Curated by Bernadine Barnes and the students in her WFU History of Prints class.

I had the opportunity to see these two exhibitions this afternoon at the Scales Fine Arts Center at Wake Forest University and to meet and talk with the artist, Ed Rice. The surfaces of his paintings were really quite beautiful and he spoke with me and my daughter about the stages his paintings go through, the grounds he uses and the drying time between the stages of his paintings in process.

This was a great conversation to have with a painter after Hannah's elective seminar, Surface and Touch. Rice spoke of rabbit skin glue, lead white ground, and applications of titanium white.