Devening Projects + Editions

Richard Roth returned to painting in 2006 after an almost ten-year hiatus during which his practice consisted of collecting and archiving cultural artifacts such as commercial paint color charts, blank legal forms, targets, and women’s compact mirrors. His current paintings are diminutive at approximately 11 3/8” x 8” x 4”, and though there is a human scale to them, especially as they’re installed at the line of sight, these paintings constitute a new, self-fabricated collection. The paintings’ unusual depth elevates them to the realm of intimate, tangible object, enabling the artist to explore the formal concerns of abstract painting in three dimensions, riffing on real and illusionistic space. Most paintings in the exhibition employ two or three colors interacting visually on five sides to produce a single image that unfolds as the viewer shifts position.

Richard Roth’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. In 1991 he was the recipient of a Visual Artists Fellowship in Painting from the National Endowment for the Arts. He received an MFA from the Tyler School of Art and a BFA from The Cooper Union. His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Tomlinson Kong Contemporary, NY; Galerie Rob de Vries, The Netherlands; David Richard Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM; HICA, Highland Institute of Contemporary Art, Loch Ruthven, Scotland; The Suburban, Oak Park, IL; Rocket Gallery, London; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Reynolds Gallery, Richmond; UCR/California Museum of Photography; the Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Japan; and Feigen, Inc., Chicago. He is the co-editor of the book, Beauty is Nowhere: Ethical Issues in Art and Design and co-author of Color Basics and Design Basics: 3D. He was the Director of Solvent Space in Richmond, Virginia, 2005 – 2009 and is currently a faculty member in the Painting and Printmaking Department at Virginia Commonwealth University.