Philippe Richard

Philippe Richard (born February 25, 1962) is a French artist, based in Paris, France.

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.

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.

Richard studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Paris (École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts).

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.

In 1997 he received a grant from the FIACRE (Fonds National d’Art Contemporain) to do a project in New York.

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.

In 1998 he also did a residency at the International Studio Program, in New York.

Since a few years ago, Richard’s paintings leave the canvas to benefit the art space and its walls.

2009 2008 2007 2006

2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2006 2005

2013 2012 2011