UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art
Las Vegas, Nevada
We believe everyone deserves access to art that challenges our understanding of the present and inspires us to create a future that makes space for us all.
Message-
Artist: Richard Francisco (American, b. 1942)
Born and raised in Napa Valley, California, Francisco left the United States after graduating high school and spent most of the next decade traveling through Europe and the Middle East. A friendship with the art historian Ernst van de Wetering in Amsterdam helped to convert him from an aspiring author to a visual artist. Self-taught, living in New York City, he became acquainted with the collectors Herb and Dorothy Vogel at the start of the 1970s and went on to hold his first one-man show at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1973. The small size of his works, his ambiguous approach to genre — is it a painting or a sculpture? — and his use of humble, hand-managed materials — watercolor, cheap wood — has seen him classified as a post-minimalist along with various other artists associated with the Vogels, such as Richard Tuttle. Francisco has shown in numerous galleries and institutions across Europe and the States. “An essential feature of his art is the relaxed freedom and variation in expression,” explained the the Stavanger Art Museum of Norway when it held an exhibition of his selected works in 2007. He has a longstanding relationship with Annamarie Verna Gallery in Zurich.