Rush Baker American, b. 1987

Rush Baker IV (b. 1987, Washington, DC) is an American painter whose work considers the construction of images as a material analogue for the instability of historical memory. Working through a process of collage, digital manipulation, plaster, ceramic adhesives, resin, and repeated cycles of excavation and reconstruction, Baker develops paintings whose surfaces record acts of accumulation as much as representation. Architectural fragments, technological systems, geological formations, and traces of the body emerge only to dissolve again, producing compositions that hold abstraction and figuration in sustained tension. While earlier bodies of work addressed contemporary political conditions directly, his recent paintings approach history through the physical behavior of materials themselves, allowing erosion, compression, fracture, and repair to become formal structures through which broader social and cultural forces are registered. Rather than illustrating historical events, Baker constructs paintings that embody history as an unstable process of continual revision.