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biography
RICHARD ANUSZKIEWICZ was born in Erie, Pennsylvania (USA) in 1930. A student of Josef Albers' at the Yale University School of Art, in 1957 Anuszkiewicz moved to New York where he worked as a restorer of architecture model and sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1958-59 he was designing for Tiffany, while from 1963-65 taught at the Cooper Union in New York. His work was included in the "Geometric Abstraction in America" exhibition at the Whitney Museum, New York, in 1962; the "Painting and Sculpture of a Decade, 1954-64" at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1964; the "Responsive Eye" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1965. He has had numerous exhibitions, since 1965 at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, the Cleveland Museum of Art and at many other museums and galleries, above all in the United States. In Europe his work was shown at the "Mouvement 2" exhibition at the Denise Rene gallery in 1965 and at the "Dokumenta 4" exhibition at Kassel in 1968. He is one of the most methodical operators in the field of visual research in the United States. In his early works he made use of patterns with perspective effects for planar experimentation for the formation of illusion and perceptive ambiguity. Subsequently, with compositions of colored parallel lines, he investigated the variation of colors by means of their interrelationships. In order to maintain the maximum purity and integrity of a derived color, he juxtaposed on the canvas graphic elements of different colors, which gave, as the perceptive synthesis, the desired composite color while emphasizing the relationships between cold and warm colors and between complementary colors. Interested above all in the affirmation of these principles, he makes systematic use of simple geometric forms as basic modules. Straight lines, sinuous lines, small circles, points, squares, etc. are organized on the surface according to arithmetical progressions, giving effects of expansion and contraction as a result of the graduation of the intervals between the lines. 1966 saw the beginning of a series of paintings in black and white, and later in color, with effects of illusory three-dimensionality and of irradiation neutralized by clear chromatic inserts: an advanced analysis of acquired optical habits and their rectification. Anuszkiewicz is one of the artists whose work most clearly reveals the fundamental problems of the psychology of perception.
exhibitions