CONTEMPORARY ART STOCKROOM Richard Blackwell

Blackwell is an Australian artist recently relocated to Sydney after years based in Doha, where he was employed as the Assistant Professor of the Foundation Woodshop and Digital Lab at VCU Arts in Qatar. He was the recipient of the 2012 Fulbright Scholarship and completed his Masters in Fine Art at the School of Art Institute of Chicago in 2014. In 2011 Blackwell exhibited a major series GROTTO, an exhibition in 3 volumes, which was shown in Canberra, Melbourne and Chicago, supported through the Australia Council of the Arts. Blackwell is currently stationed at the Design Futures Lab at UNSW and runs Studio Studio, a collective studio in Canberra ACT.

Interested in the design, materiality and reception of the built environment, Richard Blackwell’s interdisciplinary practice embraces sculpture, print media and digital fabrication to articulate the multiplicitous nature of encountering reality, from both an individual experience and from a more formal engagement with ideas of spatial theory. By referencing interior finishes and building facades the cubes, facets, clusters and waves that make up his latest body of works continues to tease out concepts and systems grounded within both architectural and art historical frameworks. Working with ideas of continuation, variability, replication and relationship, the gradual extrusion of his geometric motifs, many of which have evolved from earlier works, allows Blackwell to take simple systems to a natural, almost self-governing resolve.

My work creates an account of the experience of living and interacting in our current social reality. That experience itself is the result of countless phenomenological interactions and relationships that are mediated by technology, ideology and the concrete structure of the built environment. As a result my work is a network of objects, a combination or a collage of marks, observations and processes, parsed by technological systems and personal systems of labor. As experience is mediated by personal desire so is the work. In this sense, equally connected to the external, the work attempts to take note or be aware of my own desire to make art as production, and so reflect my experience of the world in my work.
Richard Blackwell, Artist's Statement

Richard Blackwell's work has been collected for ACT Legislative Assembly, Artbank, NAB Collection, The Justin Collection and he has undertaken several public commissions including the Mayfare Apartments, Canberra, 65 Mary Street, Brisbane and the NEXUS M+A Laneway Project, Brisbane, both undertaken with Urban Art Projects.

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City, 2020 (left) and Capsule Space Corp, 2020 (right)

Mask, 2020

Straddling sculpture and printmedia, the interdisciplinary creations of Richard Blackwell trace the physiognomy and psychology of the built environment. Created on film faced plywood, the labyrinthine reliefs in his new series deal with ideas of modularity, fusing individual experience with architectonic space and dismantling what’s left of the weathered walls between physicality and digitality.
Excerpt of catalogue essay by Elli Walsh, 2020

Coax, 2020 (left), Fibre, 2020 (middle) and Graphite, 2020 (right)

Spark, 2020

Sync, 2020

Lost, 2020

Richard Blackwell's Offset Surface Series, 2020 and Dion Hortsman's Full Circle works on paper, 2020 (2nd and 4th from left)

Ribbon, 2018

Cycling Down Anzac Parade, 2019 (left), The Upside Down, 2018 (right)

Purchase the Richard Blackwell monograph

This 104pp artist monograph focuses on the art practice of FLG's Richard Blackwell from 2009 until 2018. Limited edition of 100, full colour, printed on 300gsm satin art paper and PUR bound. Each limited-edition book is signed and numbered by the artist. $33 AUD GST inclusive.
Copies of the publication are available by contacting the gallery.