Clark Richert

Through his mathematical paintings, drawings, animations, and sculpture, Clark Richert speculates about the nature and structure of reality. He is inspired by Mark Rothko’s use of color and Buckminster Fuller’s theories regarding the structure of the universe. Richert writes “As an artist, I operate on a premise that I need not be bound by the scientist’s responsibility of proof; my responsibility is to freely interpret. That viewers fully understand all the subject matter in my work is not as important to me as their having a sense of the basic content: that these paintings are postulations about large things.”

Clark Richert (b. 1941, d. 2021) was born in Wichita, KS. He earned his BFA from the University of Kansas in 1963 and his MFA from the University of Colorado in 1972. He is one of four founding members of Drop City, (Trinidad, CO, 1965), which is considered the first counterculture artist’s community in the US. Their strategic use of mutated geodesic dome structures drew the attention of Bucky Fuller for which they received the first Dymaxion Award in 1966. Subsequently, Richert went on to co-found the artists’ movement known as Criss Cross in Boulder, CO., which continued the original concepts of Drop City. Over the past 50 years.

Richert has exhibited widely in galleries and intuitions across the world, including the Walker Art Center of Minneapolis; The Denver Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, AZ; The Kirkland Museum, Denver; The Museum of Modern Art, Vienna Austria; Yellowstone Art Center, Billings MT; The Biennial of the Americas, Denver; Berkley Art Museum, CA; RedLine Contemporary Art Center, Denver; the Cranbrook Art Museum, MI; Museum of Friends, Walsenburg, CO, among many others.

In 2019, Richert was given a dual career retrospective, staged at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Richert recently unveiled two public artworks; Quadrivium, a fourteen-foot, lighted aluminum triacontahedron structure in 2020, and Four Color Intertwine, both in Denver. In addition to public and corporate commissions, his work can be found in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum, Nelson-Atkins Museum, Wichita Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, Kirkland Museum, University of Colorado, Boulder, Amoco, Container Corporation of America as well as many prominent private collections.