February 26 - April 9, 2022

Reception: February 26, 2022 4-6 pm

Artist Talk: March 12, 2022 11 am

An exhibition of Bruce Richards’ work is akin to the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, a dense collection of art historical objects, sculptures, and architectural fragments, that are obsessively, but meticulously installed, demonstrating a passion for history and its linkages to the present. In Richards' work Crossroads, from his Exquisite Corpse series, a small 19th century bust of Mars, the god of war, sits on a small shelf below an oval painting of a nuclear mushroom cloud with billowy puffs that echo the curls of Mars’ hair. In another series entitled Course of Empire, the artist references Thomas Cole’s 1837 painting Destruction, but the images are simply black tires burning in an undefined space, like an Ed Ruscha word on fire. As Richards states, his work is about visual analogies and metaphorical readings, reinvesting objects with allegory often by simply pairing one thing with another.  The idea of one plus one equaling not two, but an infinite possibility of readings is a profoundly suggestive artistic practice employed by the Surrealists, as well as Richards’ fellow student at UCI in the early 70s, Alexis Smith.  In fact, in a third body of work in this exhibition entitled Ex Libris, pays homage to some of Richards’ art heroes through finely crafted basswood sculptures of art history books.  Those of us from the pre-digital age who saw their first Magritte in a book, have a tactile affinity with the shape and feel of books, the curves of the open pages, and the smell of paper and libraries.  These book sculptures, each with a single illustration, or “plate,” reference not only art history, but a personal and intimate discovery.

Keenan Derby on this body of work:

My current paintings are part of an ongoing exploration of light and color inspired by the forests and deserts of Southern California. This series of work draws influence from the ecosystems of the desert chaparral, examining how desert scrub plants grow outwards against the landscape, expanding their root systems to seek out groundwater. I aim to capture the twisted and gnarled forms of the ancient pinyon pines and junipers, sagebrush, and creosote as they break through and obfuscate the deceptively expansive and wrinkling vistas and the light-saturated haze that envelops the surrounding valleys, hills, and mountains. The making of direct, observational plein-air paintings function as artifacts of my lived experience. The small works bring to the table a specificity of place in terms of atmosphere, density, color, and depth. In these larger studio paintings, I use accumulated layers of washes, scrapes, smears, and layers of color that push and pull against one another to create a sense of depth and space. Through the processes of replication and manipulation, these organic structures transform to take on new forms and meaning. The convergence of these two modes of working becomes a meditation on time.

Bruce Richards, Flat World, 2018-21, oil on linen, 16 x 23.5 in.