| Erie, PA, 1930 – American painter, printmaker and sculptor. Richard received his initial training at the Cleveland Institute of Art in Cleveland, Ohio (1948–53), and later trained under Josef Albers at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture in New Haven, CT (1953–5). During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the artist depicted everyday city life in his art. After moving to New York in 1957, he worked as a conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and as a silver designer for Tiffany and Co. During this period, he began to producing abstract art, using either organic or geometric repeated forms. By early 1960s, he had graduated to asymmetric and imperfectly geometric works, such as FLOURESCENT COMPONENTS (1960: MOMA), and then to more rigidly structured arrangements, for example IN THE FOURTH OF THREE (1963: Whitney Museum), which consists of blue and green squares on a red ground. The artist is best known for his geometrical networks of coloured lines. Since the early 1960s, the Artist has also created screenprints, lithographs and prints made by intaglio techniques, all within the realms of Op art. In the late 1960s, he turned to sculpture, characteristically making painted wooden cubes, sometimes on a mirror base, such as the SPIRAL. His main concern continued to be with the perception of colours and with the exploration of a variety of effects. |
