"Beach thinks simultaneously in painterly and sculptural terms, which became clear in “Mid-Sentence.”  The works were arranged together on plinths of identical area (though of varying heights), usually in groups of two or more, evenly spaced in groups of two or more, evenly spaced in a familiar modernist grid.  Movement was integral to the experience of the works; as viewers navigated the grid, their changes of position created multiple, shifting viewpoints that denied stability."

—Ray Cronin, “Rachel Beach,” Sculpture Magazine, (Nov. 2017)

 

"Beach’s work often references the ways and means of architecture, and she’s particularly interested in transitional elements in the built environment—“seams that transition space to plane, edges that frame an experience or vista, the place the floor meets the wall, or where a hallway opens to a room,” she explains. The references in her current work are broad-ranging, from ancient armor and shields to symbolic languages such as hieroglyphs, marine flags, and typography."

—Ariela Gittlen. “6 Artists Who Are Pushing the Limits of Wood,” Artsy, (Oct, 2017)

"Every once in a while, as I wander through Rachel Beach’s Mid- Sentence, I stop suddenly because I think I see someone just beside or near me, out of the corner of my eye. Each time, I realize with slight embarrassment that it is not another gallery goer, but one of Beach’s painted sculptures. It’s not so much that they too closely resemble the human body, as it is where this angle or that curve sit in height, in relation to a body. The walls are filled with quartets of paper-based pieces that layer materials and techniques atop each other to create sculptural images, while twelve groups of colorful, geometric wood sculptures fill the Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery like groups of friends chatting at a party. This collection of nearly a decade’s worth of Beach’s work plays with the tension between painting and sculpture, image and object, abstraction and figure in a conversational way that suggests we are in fact catching them mid-sentence."

—Higgins, Kathleen. “Holding Space with Rachel Beach,” Visual Arts News, (Spring 2017)

"Beach is known for her geometric, totem-like sculptures done primarily in painted wood, which often consist of bulky shapes balanced on impossibly narrow points of contact — bravura performances of engineering, craft, and imagination. Her surfaces are tours de force of color, pattern, and design, and beg the question of whether her work is painted sculpture or painting on sculpture. The point is that it is both and neither; Beach is an expansive artist who pursues an eccentric harmony of disparate elements, and with this show she adds photography and video to the mix."

—Micchelli, Thomas. “The Work of Hands: Rachel Beach’s ‘Touchstone’,” Hyperallergic, (Oct 2016)

"Rachel Beach: ‘GATHER-ER’; closes on Sunday. In her solo debut, this artist seems bent on breathing new life into so-called formalist sculpture by playing a lively sense of geometric angularity against subtle shifts in material, color and surface. Contrasts among new and “reclaimed” wood, silk-screened and painted textures (some of which evoke but aren’t Formica) and strips of aluminum differentiate, dissect and realign our sense of plane and edge, interior and exterior, front and side. Yellow is used to great effect."

—Roberta Smith, “Rachel Beach: GATHER-ER,” The New York Times, (March 2011)