Philippe Richard (artist)


Philippe Richard is a French artist, based in Paris, France. He lived New York from 1996 to 1999. He has been very close to some American painters such as Joan Mitchell and Shirley Jaffe. Some of his work resides in the THEODORE:Art gallery in Brooklyn, New York.

Biography

Philippe Richard studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Paris.
From 1994 to 1996 he did a residency at Straumur Art Commune in Iceland.
From 1994 to 1995 he received a grant « Leonard de Vinci » to go to Iceland.
In 1997 he received a grant from the FIACRE to do a project in New York.
In 1998 he also did a residency at the International Studio Program, in New York.

Statement

Since a few years ago, Philippe Richard’s paintings leave the canvas to benefit the art space and its walls. This work started in 1996 in Iceland when he released 180 bottles into the sea, each containing a different gouache titled « Months, years ». The bottles were combined with a series of 77 paintings on driftwood from the Icelandic beaches. Since then, a third of the gouaches have been found and collected by different people from Norway, Germany and the United Kingdom.
Thanks to this experience he started to rethink his idea about painting and surfaces. Since 1997 he started a long series of "painting steles" and "atmospherics variables", "earth edges" and "lineaments" where parallel works run during the reassessment of paintings.
Philippe Richard considers his paintings as juggling between physical spaces and canvas’ spaces. The exhibition space is no more a receptacle; Philippe Richard starts to build a relationship between art pieces and art spaces so that it becomes an active background. Matrix is the result of all his research, making the paintings and the art spaces one.

Selected solo exhibitions

2013
2012
2011
2009
2008
2007
2006
2012
2011
2010
2009
2008
2006
2005