RICHARD VAN DER AA | pictures of paintings
March 3 - April 14, 2017
Opening Reception: Friday, March 3, 6-9pm
In the Main Gallery, Richard van der Aa presents pictures of paintings, a suite of consonant, reductive works that examine the point of tension between painting and sculpture, object and image. In describing van der Aa’s work as a “metalanguage of painting with which to ponder its own object,” artist Daniel G. Hill writes, “We find ourselves at the margin between the pictorial and the concrete, questioning our comfort with distinctions and categories that enable us to make sense of the world, not with unease but with the pleasure of wonder.” (Margins of Tolerance, essay, Oct. 2016).
Richard van der Aa lives and works in Paris, France. He was born in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1963. After studying painting at the University of Canterbury and graduating in 1985, he moved to Sydney, Australia. From 1998 to 2004 van der Aa was Faculty Head of Visual Arts at the School of Creative Arts, Oxford Falls, Sydney, and he completed a Master of Fine Arts at COFA (University of NSW) in 2004. In 2005 van der Aa moved to Paris, France. In 2009, he and his wife Anna established the ParisCONCRET association for the dissemination of reductive abstract art. Van der Aa presented his first solo exhibition at the C.S.A. Gallery in Christchurch in 1985. His work has since been exhibited extensively in Australia and New Zealand, and in recent years, in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Poland, the UK and the USA.