CONTEMPORARY ART STOCKROOM Richard Blackwell

Current Exhibitions

Labyrinth

Purchase the Richard Blackwell monograph

104pp artist monograph 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. This is the first in a series of artist monographs published by FLG.

Each limited-edition book is signed and numbered by the artist. $33 AUD GST inclusive.
Copies of the publication are available via our Bigcartel store or contact the gallery to secure your copy.

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.

Richard Blackwell has long been fascinated with space in an astronomical sense. Now, in the exhibition 0, 0, 0 (zero, zero, zero) Blackwell contemplates the digital illusion of space, revolving around ‘the grid acting as a symbol of the infinite space of virtual reality.Blackwell’s multi-faceted wall works present manifold possibilities as to the arrangement of identical elements within clearly defined and gridded boundaries. It is as if he is attempting to represent the basic 0-1 binary code in formal, though structural, relief.
Excerpt of catalogue essay by Andrew Gaynor, 2018

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

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.

His work has been collected for 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.