Jim Richard: My Old Flame
Exhibition Dates: October 5–November 16, 2024
Opening Reception: October 5, from 6–8 pm
Gallery Location: 432 Julia St., New Orleans, LA 70130
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 10 am–5 pm
Contact Info: 504-522-1999; www.arthurrogergallery.com
The Arthur Roger Gallery is pleased to present My Old Flame, an exhibition of recent paintings and collages by Jim Richard. The exhibition will be on view at Arthur Roger Gallery, located at 432 Julia St, from October 5–November 16, 2024. The gallery will host an opening on Saturday, October 5, from 6–8 PM.
My Old Flame, Jim Richard’s eleventh exhibition with the Arthur Roger Gallery, features recent paintings and collages that explore the perimeter of utopia and nostalgia, the manipulation and insertion of source imagery, and interior spaces.
Richard has invited artists Steve DiBenedetto and Dike Blair to participate in this exhibition, a curatorial choice highlighting the push and pull of the abstract and the eerily familiar in Richard’s own work.
Richard’s Never Better series suggests the generic response one might give to the question “How are you?”—a response that is as suspiciously idyllic as the manicured yards and just-so split-levels portrayed on his canvases (often in a meticulous, monochromatic range of values). Inspired by the practice of artists who replicate iconic artworks (sometimes down to a single brushstroke, as in the case of Roy Lichtenstein), Richard’s Paintings of Paintings series transforms emotive, brushy paintings into complex systems of flat, floating shapes. These works are not explicitly representative of well-known paintings, but rather stand-ins for what Richard calls the Modernist “look.” Here, the emphasis is on the experience of a painting, frozen in place, like a deer in the headlights.
Originally from Port Arthur, TX (b. 1943), Jim Richard received a BFA from Lamar State College of Technology in Beaumont, TX (1965), and an MFA from the University of Colorado (1968). In addition to a lengthy career as an educator in the Fine Arts Department at University of New Orleans, Richard has exhibited extensively (and internationally) for the past 25 years, including solo exhibitions at Inman Gallery, the New Orleans Museum of Art, Jeff Bailey Gallery, and the Houston Museum of Art. Richard was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award in 2006, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in 2004. His work can be found in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the New Orleans Museum of Art, among many others. Jim lives and works in New Orleans, LA.
