LIBBY RICHEY: A VIOLENT PERSONA
BY WILL MADDOXX
Interesting things are happening in Ridgewood. Tempest Gallery has been putting up interesting shows for years, A.D. NYC moved to Ridgewood at the beginning of the summer, and in August, Pushup Gallery moved to their new location on George Street in Ridgewood. Their first full-length exhibition is a solo show by Libby Richey titled Bachelor, which combines images of baseball, car crashes, and cock-and-ball torture to discuss violence that feels deeply American.
Bachelor is a series of 18 paintings on panels, at most 10 inches in length, rendered in vibrant encaustic paint. Encaustic, as a material, gives each of the works a waxy texture that almost feels bodily. A cloudy layer, like snot or ejaculate, obscures our vision of the full images. The small scale of these works, too, invites us in but keeps us at a distance. Often, the small compositions contain multiple figures, so nowhere do we get a full view of expressions or distinct features; the figures are more like components of a landscape than the subject of a portrait. This seems to be a distance Richey wants to maintain—in their piece Cop on the scene, we almost get a full view of a man’s face, but a cap pulled down keeps us from seeing his eyes.
Libby Richey, Hockey Diptych, 2026. Encaustic and oil pastel on wood, 7 ½ x 9 in (each)
Palette is an integral part of this body of work. Despite their size, incredibly vibrant pigments feel flashy and grand, like in Pool, a painting dominated by the electric blue-green of a pool table. When I saw the painting Mets vs Red Sox, I saw an immediate comparison to Rothko. Though the image comes from the broadcast of a baseball game, the palette and composition feel uncannily similar to a work like No. 3, No. 13 Magenta, Black, Green on Orange, 1949. An earlier historical reference can be found in the painting Backyard Magicians, where two standing women hunch over a reclining figure, reminiscent of paintings of Judith and Holofernes.
The images painted for this show feel mundane, but together they’re unnerving. A magician sawing a woman in half, a wrestling match, the shadow of an attack helicopter, a NASCAR crash, a figure with a rifle—these relate to forms of violence that feel quotidian in American life. In Bachelor, Libby Richey seems to ask why.
Libby Richey: Bachelor, Pushup Gallery, 17-38 George St, Ridgewood, NY. Through September 26, 2026.
