As one of America's preeminent colorists, Richard Anuszkiewicz focuses on the visual effects that take place when different high-intensity colors are arranged in similar geometric forms. Having trained at the Cleveland Institute of Art in Ohio, Anuszkiewicz only fully began experimenting with optics and colors after studying under Josef Albers—he of the famed "Homage to the Square" series—at Yale University in the mid-1950s. There he began to further explore the effects of color and formal shapes on visual perception.
In the 1960s Anuszkiewicz, along with artists Bridget Riley in England and Victor Vasarey in France, pioneered the Op Art movement which is based around artworks that create the illusion of spatial motion through illusory optical effects. Deemed "one of the new wizards of Op" by Life magazine in 1964, Anuszkiewicz forwent the organic shapes of Abstract Expressionism to study the psychological and physiological effects of saturated colors arranged in mathematically precise forms, garnering praise from critic Hilton Kramer for the recognized "brute retinal power" of his paintings.
Because Anuszkiewicz utilizes advancements made by modern visual science his work is often conflated with "scientific" art, though its main focus is instead on non-objective experience. The artist aims to center the viewer's focus on the act of painting and encourages one to reflect on the nature of human experience in the physical world, and how what is seen is privileged over that which isn't.
Richard Anuszkiewicz has been involved in more than 100 solo shows and countless group exhibitions around the world. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; New York, the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Tate Gallery of Modern Art, London. He has also been exhibited in major international shows such as Documenta 4 (1968), the Venice Biennale (1986), and the Florence Biennale in 2005.