User talk:Connaught Brown

Presentation
Paul Richards first came to prominence in the seventies for the satirical and subversive performance-based art he produced with Bruce MacLean in Nice Style, the World’s First Pose Band. The quest to give his subjects a striking, memorable image carries on in his painting as too the sense of theatre and movement and an ironic consciousness of the role of artifice and fiction in art and perception.

Richards’ portraits and still lives, with their thick, shiny and lushly applied oils and their dramatic colour and vitality have a seductive appeal which befits their concern with human desire. This plays with the disintegration and chaos that his surfaces seem to threaten and the theme of the isolated and solitary being or object that he depicts.

People or objects, Richards interrogates his subjects and successfully captures and then recreates their essential matter or inner characteristic. It is in more recent years that he has turned his attention towards still-lives, but his inanimate objects take on a life of their own, re-invented by the artist during the course of painting. The portrait heads, for long now Richards’ primary subject, are charged with an emotional depth and complexity of extraordinary potency.

Paul Richards is represented by Connaught Brown Gallery, London.


 * 1) Connaught Brown Gallery[]

Selected Biography
Born: 1949

Educated: St Martins School of Art, Maidstone School of Art

Senior Lecturer: Slade School of Art

One-Man:

1967: Robert Self Gallery, London

1977: Battersea Arts Centre, London

1981, 82, 83: Lewis Johnstone Gallery, London

1985: ‘Red Rite’, Riverside Studios, London;‘Love Dance’, Connaught Brown, London

1988,90: Connaught Brown, London

1991: Denis Hotz Fine Art, Johannesburg

1992,94: Connaught Brown, London 1995: Carling Dalenson, Stockholm

1996,98: Connaught Brown, London

1996: Dalenson Gallery, Naples, Florida

2003,06: Connaught Brown, London

Mixed:

1972: ‘The British Thing’, Oslo

1973: ‘Critics Choice’, Tooth Gallery, London;‘Deep Freeze’ (performance), Hanover Grand, London

1974: ‘A Problem of Positioning’ (performance), Architectural Association, London

1975: ‘End of an Era’, Robert Self Gallery, London

1979: ‘The Masterwork’ (performance), Riverside Studios, London

1982: ‘Collazione Inglese’, Venice,‘The New Classicism’, Bremio Lubiam, Italy

1983: New Purchase Exhibition, Arts Council Collection, National Theatre, London;‘The Formal and Informal’, Gallery of Modern Art, Bologna

1984: APERTO 84, Venice Biennale

1985: ‘Room at the Top’, Nicola Jacobs Gallery, London;Festival d’Eté de Seine Maritime, Rouen

1987-88: ‘The Arts for Television’, touring Exhibition - venues included: Stedelijk Museum, 			Amsterdam; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée National d’Art Moderne,Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate Gallery, London

1991: Recent Purchases, Contemporary Art Society, Camden Arts Centre, London

1994: Summer Exhibition, O’Hara Gallery, New York

1997: ‘Wait and See (What’s for Dinner)’, Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne

2004–05: ‘Tom Bendhem: Collector’, Contemporary Art Society Touring Exhibition

Publications:

Fenner, Felicity, Paul Richards – A Certain Fiction, Florida, 1996