This fall the New Orleans Museum of Art is pleased to present a solo exhibition of work by Jim Richard. Jim Richard: Make Yourself at Home will be the artist’s first solo exhibition at NOMA since 1978.
As in his earlier work, Jim Richard continues to explore American culture through the private environments people create.
A suite of new, large-scale paintings by Jim Richard reveals an artist at the height of his powers of composition and technique.
For years, New Orleans painter Jim Richard has articulated an acidic social commentary through unpeopled interiors of the showy sort featured in domicile magazines. Many of his paintings employ an icy, synthetic palette to depict settings over-decorated with contrasting examples of historical and recent art. “These are the places,” one critic wrote, “where art goes to die.”
Distinguished artist Jim Richard has invited us into his rooms but does not allow us to enter. What can almost be described as a life-long obsession, his work, which will hang at the Abercrombie Gallery through Oct. 20, deals with organic and man-made structures and pokes fun at what Richard describes as “the good life.”
With deadpan irony, Jim Richard meditates on one of the modern artist’s main moral challenges: how to reconcile spiritual aspirations and material desires.
Jim Richard forces together elements of visual culture that are rich in connotations of social hierarchy and the diversity of taste. His paintings are like American food: flat, rich, irradiated and filled with chemical additives.