Richard Kalina
For more than two decades, Richard Kalina’s boundless curiosity has produced an evolving and developing body of work that continuously builds upon itself. Twenty years ago, he was working with biomorphic forms in transparent pigments over a collage of photocopied newsprint. Over the next five years, these elements became denser and much more complicated. He replaced the background of typefaces with a pattern of floral botanical engravings, which then for a couple of years flipped into the foreground over grounds of colored stripes. Beginning in 1999, Kalina dropped the imagery and began to collage grid-patterned paintings from strips and pieces of painted paper. By 2001, Kalina had defined some elements that have been more or less consistent since then: margins and gridded-squares of exposed linen, colored fields with woven stripes, squares, circles, and ovals. By the time of his last show in 2012, he had divided the formerly uniform backgrounds into tilting planes, added hexagons and was exploring an often more free-form distribution of elements in both his paintings and watercolors.
Richard Kalina was born in 1946 and studied at the University of Pennsylvania. He began exhibiting in 1969 and has regularly shown his work in museums and galleries, both …
For more than two decades, Richard Kalina’s boundless curiosity has produced an evolving and developing body of work that continuously builds upon itself. Twenty years ago, he was working with biomorphic forms in transparent pigments over a collage of photocopied newsprint. Over the next five years, these elements became denser and much more complicated. He replaced the background of typefaces with a pattern of floral botanical engravings, which then for a couple of years flipped into the foreground over grounds of colored stripes. Beginning in 1999, Kalina dropped the imagery and began to collage grid-patterned paintings from strips and pieces of painted paper. By 2001, Kalina had defined some elements that have been more or less consistent since then: margins and gridded-squares of exposed linen, colored fields with woven stripes, squares, circles, and ovals. By the time of his last show in 2012, he had divided the formerly uniform backgrounds into tilting planes, added hexagons and was exploring an often more free-form distribution of elements in both his paintings and watercolors.
Richard Kalina was born in 1946 and studied at the University of Pennsylvania. He began exhibiting in 1969 and has regularly shown his work in museums and galleries, both nationally and internationally. Kalina exhibited with Ivan Karp during the early years of OK Harris Gallery, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, Piezo Electric, and Diane Brown. He has been included in several important survey exhibitions of abstract painting, including both exhibitions titled Conceptual Abstraction, first at Sidney Janis Gallery in 1991 and in the exhibition that revisited that show, and which was held at the Hunter College Art Gallery in 2012. In addition to his work in painting and drawing, Richard Kalina is a well-known art critic, serving as a Contributing Editor at Art in America and regularly publishing articles in that magazine and others. He is the author of Imagining the Present: Context, Content, and the Role of the Critic, published by Routledge Press. Richard Kalina is Professor of Art at Fordham University in New York, where he teaches studio art and art history. He is a member of the National Academy.
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Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut
Arkansas Arts Center
Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, New York
Harvard University Art Museums, Fogg Art Museum
Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington, Indiana
Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana
Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC
New York University, Grey Art Gallery
Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida
Parrish Museum of Art, Southampton, NY
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia
Plattsburgh State Art Museum, State University of New York, Plattsburgh Princeton University
Rutgers University Art Museum
United States Department of State
University of New Mexico Art Museum
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven
