* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Daniel Rich was born in Ulm, Germany and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He earned a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art and an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA.
Daniel explains the work by saying, “I translate photographs into paintings that call attention to implicit political and social narratives transcribed in the built environment. The architectural image is represented in my work to introduce a dialogue about changing political power structures, failed utopias, the impacts of ideological struggles, war and natural upheavals. I am interested in the highly symbolic role architecture plays in politics and its power to function as an icon of our lived experience, a portrait of an existential phenomenology whose features manifest where society is at one particular moment in history. My paintings point to the shifting of the significance and meaning in both images of places and the places themselves. My interest in the potential divergence and duality of images and the media’s role in covering and presenting issues to the public is closely tied to a pictorial architecture, and its ability to act as an icon for political, religious and social systems and beliefs. I collect and appropriate photographs I find on the Internet and in newspapers, in response to radio and television broadcasts, and through research and reading. The mediated image is painted in order to invest the picture with the capability to function as a signifier and to evoke meaning and discourse.”