“I don’t approach painting with a fixed conclusion. Meaning emerges through relationships between objects, spaces, memory, and time and often continues unfolding long after the painting is finished.”

-Rick Sanders

Over the course of more than four decades, Rick Sanders has developed a deeply personal

painting practice rooted in memory, domestic space, and the shifting emotional terrain of

everyday life. Working primarily in oil, Sanders creates what he describes as fractured

portraits and painted collages, layered compositions where houses, interiors, figures, and

familiar objects dissolve and reassemble through accumulation, revision, and intuition.

Central to Sanders’ practice is an openness to ambiguity and transformation. Relationships

between objects and narratives continuously shift, allowing a single image to generate

multiple readings at once. Meanings fracture, repeat, and evolve over time. Sanders has

often spoken about returning to paintings years later and suddenly recognizing what the

work had been holding beneath the surface all along. His compositions resist fixed

interpretation, instead unfolding psychologically and emotionally through repeated

viewing.

This exhibition brings together works spanning the breadth of Sanders’ sustained studio

practice alongside more recent paintings, including examples connected to his Fractured

Portraits and Snake Houses series. Across these works, Sanders constructs visual worlds

that feel at once intimate and elusive, spaces where memory, storytelling, and lived

experience remain in constant negotiation.

A painter, author, veteran, and retired arts educator, Sanders has maintained an active

and prolific creative life since beginning his professional career in the late 1970s following

studies at the University of South Florida. His paintings and writings have been featured in

the Chattanooga Times Free Press, Chattanooga Pulse, LOCATE Arts, and exhibitions

throughout the Southeast. His books, including The Walking Bridge and Strange Times in

Yeeha Junction, extend the same nonlinear and emotionally resonant storytelling found

throughout his visual work.

Organized by Leah Dalton, Founder and Director of The 109 Gallery.