Rick Prol’s Dark Cities
- Feb 24, 2025
- 3 min read
Updated: Jul 4, 2025
Written by Michael Klein, Owner & Director
Michael Klein is best known for his work and achievements in the field of contemporary art. As both a dealer and curator, he has had a long and distinguished career as a New York gallery owner and director, representing an international roster of emerging and mid-career artists. He became the first in-house curator for Microsoft Corp.
Beginning in the early 80s and the days of the East Village art scene, Rick Prol has distinguished himself by focusing on the climate, mood, environment, and character of the urban dweller. These mostly solo figures, as if characters from a Samuel Beckett play, are trapped, in a way, in the decay, angst, and turmoil of city life. A man is caught and is attempting to survive in the city. New York in the 70s and 80s was a deeply troubled city with great disparities in economic reality. Some were rich, others poor, sharing the same streets, public transit, and daily life.
What drew me to Prol’s work is that he is one of the few painters addressing social issues, and yet today, with our many political and economic concerns, his voice has yet to be heard in many ways. Yet these works are now examples of his early career in the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Ackland Art Museum, the Aldrich Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, even the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. All recognize the importance and significance of these works. While New York is his model, these grand silhouettes in oil or pastel could be anywhere that we find a distressed urban community. Dead Time, 1985, is a prime example of his early works in which the figure is staged within the ruins of an urban dwelling; a dwelling from today or from a conflict in the recent past. The theme remains a constant in human endeavors. And as Prol explained in a recent conversation, “for me, they are outer manifestations of what is inside, and they are as true to that inner being as I can possibly make them.”
That truth now extends into his most recent works, the Empty City series, as he calls them, which focus on the city itself. Modern cities now exist around the world, from New York to London and from Nairobi to Bangkok. All have high rise towers, mass transit, crowds, and traffic. But at the heart of Prol’s work is the dark side of urban life. The cityscapes he creates are the city at night, at those hours when we sleep, and the buildings stand against the skyline as dark, remote towers. Some of these recent paintings are deliberately long and horizontal, expanding to mimic a map of the city; others are smaller vignettes, as if we are peering out of a window onto a neighboring building and empty streets.
Other painters have addressed urban scenes; for example, Alex Katz, Wayne Thiebaud, and Robert Moskowitz, three contemporary artists, and even the late British painter Frank Auerbach, who focused his works on the city of London. However, unlike these other painters, Prol is not telling us about a specific city or documenting a specific place. He is focused on a universal image of mass urban structures at night. The drama and power of each painting is that it does not convey details, but exists as a strong iconic comment on what he sees and remembers as a city dweller himself. Prol can't ignore the reality of life in the city today, and his recent large scale paintings ask us to pay attention too. The simplicity of these works, dark against color fields, belies the intense and sobering reality of the story they tell.
In a series of smaller paintings, he shows us the remains of fire or war. The buildings are remnants, and the simple dark structures against a monochromatic background could be an image from Gaza or LA.
What I think is remarkable about this new series is that it can represent the very present or the past; they are symbolic of a world we create and recreate decade after decade.
Read more from Michael Klein
Michael Klein, Owner & Director
Michael Klein's expertise lies in his role as a private art dealer and freelance, independent curator for individuals, institutions, and arts organizations. Today, Michael Klein Arts works with a diverse group of artists, estates, galleries, and non-profit institutions, providing management, curatorial, and other consulting services. At the same time, the company serves institutional as well as private collectors, focusing on developing collections of emerging, mid-career, and established artists. The company also organizes traveling exhibitions both in the United States and abroad.
