Dylan Rose Rheingold (b. 1997, New York, New York) delves into the effects and experiences of girlhood within American contemporary culture in her painting practice by foregrounding symbols of her adolescence, femininity, and heterogeneous cultural background to investigate the idea of otherness. By re-presenting these elements in occasionally unexpected configurations, she threads a non-linear narrative throughout her oeuvre, populated with ambiguous representations of family, friends, and the artist herself. The stories that spill forth highlight everyday emotions and quotidian spaces which exaggerate the details and often vailed truths- such as braces, birth control, heavy periods & stretch marks- within the dynamism of the coming of age feminine experience.

Rheingold received her BFA from Syracuse University and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York. Her paintings have been featured in exhibitions at Jupiter Contemporary, Miami Beach; T293 Gallery, Rome; Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York; London Paint Club, London; Grove Collective, London; Backhaus Projects, Berlin; China Academy of Art, Hangzhou; Latitude Gallery, New York; Selenas Mountain, New York; UUU Art Collective, Rochester; Ki Smith Gallery, New York; amongst others. Rheingold lives and works in New York City.

Themes and imagery central to Rheingold’s practice include symbols of adolescence, femininity, and a heterogeneous cultural background. By re-presenting these elements in occasionally unexpected configurations, Rheingold threads a non-linear narrative throughout her oeuvre, populated with family, friends, and ambiguous representations of the artist herself. The stories that spill forth highlight everyday emotions and quotidian spaces which exaggerate the details and often vailed truths– such as the braces, oily skin, acne, birth control, heavy periods and stretch marks– of the teenage feminine experience. The artist describes this period of time as one in which the body of a young woman “inherently takes on the responsibility to hold everyone else’s gaze.”

Veritable dreamscapes of the mind, Rheingold’s compositions are representational in their depictions of, for example, girls passing a tampon under the door of a bathroom stall (The Girls Rooms, 2021), attempting to buy beer when underage (Zip Code?, 2022), applying temporary tattoos under a fort made of blankets (Under the Fort, 2021). They are, however, also marked by a rich layering of varied media, and an inclination towards abstraction and surrealism. Acrylic, charcoal, china marker, colored pencil, and sometimes spray paint are applied by Rheingold in tandem, after creating a gestural sketch of the composition with oil sticks on canvas. The resulting union of varied techniques—exemplified by Take A Hint (2021) wherein the background is suffused in a wash of red oil paint, the faces of three figures at a dinner table are roughly articulated in china marker, and their clothes are ornamented with spray paint—challenges the conventional formality of her medium and produces a rather mystical haze that suggests the vagaries of memory.