Living in Solitude: Navigating Life in Isolation

Bill Rice: Chronicler of Urban Solitude

Since 2011, when I first reviewed Bill Rice’s gritty nighttime views of New York City’s Lower East Side, I have come to think of him as a singular chronicler of urban solitude between dusk and dawn. Using thin layers of sooty blacks, moody reds, dirty yellows, fiery oranges, and earthen browns, Rice depicted lone figures in compressed, smoldering settings, where inescapable isolation is his subject’s only companion. Bill Rice, the artist’s debut exhibition at the newly opened Donald Ryan Gallery, offers viewers a chance to reassess this inimitable and overlooked artist.

Of the exhibition’s 12 paintings, dating from 1973 to ’95, only “Purple Blow” (1995) has more than one figure. As the title conveys, Rice depicts two men about to engage in fellatio, one standing and the other kneeling, with his arms by his side. It is not immediately clear whether they are in a room beside a bed with dirty sheets or outside in an urban cul-de-sac. They are not touching, and there is no hint of passion. Rice repeatedly returned to this sense of alienation rather than intimacy (however fleeting) in his work.

In “Man” (1979), we see the back of a nude man as he looks down onto the streets below, his forearms resting on an iron railing. The thinly painted dark orange and orange-red rectangles on either side of him suggest something glowing below. Is it a sign of volcanic passion or a destructive conflagration that he is observing from a distance?

The feeling of remoteness haunts Rice’s paintings. His images of men standing with their backs to the viewer suggest voyeurism, as if they’re looking at something we cannot see, but also heighten the sense of estrangement.

For “Window Gate” (1980), Rice lays an open diamond grid over the windows’ subdued orange and umber rectangles and dirty gray and black walls. The space is compressed, as if the city’s anonymity is too much with us. By synthesizing aspects of abstraction and representation in the same painting, Rice anticipates the blurring of boundaries between the two in later paintings. His attraction to thinned-out dirty reds and gritty black shares some qualities with Mark Rothko’s abstractions without being derivative. Rice’s sharp painterly sensibility is apparent in his ability to absorb and restate aspects of other artists’ work, making it appear fresh and unique to his aesthetic. His use of blacks and grays to convey an urban mood is unrivaled. The paintings are paradoxes of bleakness and sensuality, gloom and intrepid spirits. They are testimonies to survival.

In “Silks” (1984), the faint reflection of a yellow cab in the window on one side of the recessed entryway and the man in a bright red hoodie and dark blue dungarees on the other side underscore a world of extreme isolation and missed connections. The red neon sign on the doorway seems to transform it into a portal to Dante’s hell.

I see Rice, along with Martin Wong, as acutely attuned to the denizens of Manhattan’s devastated, plucky Lower East Side before it became gentrified and hardened. When the New Museum reopens in early 2026, it ought to dedicate a room to these astute, sympathetic observers of an artistic and cultural ethos that was devastated by AIDS and the US government’s genocidal policy of denial and indifference.

Bill Rice continues at Donald Ryan Gallery (15 East 71st Street, 2A, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through January 10. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.