Clark Richert
Clark Richert (1941-2021) received his MFA from the University of Colorado and his BFA from the University of Kansas. He was named faculty emeritus at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design. In 1966, he was co-recipient of the Dymaxion Award from Buckminster R. Fuller, and he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1980. His group and solo gallery exhibitions span the last 50 years. His work was featured in MCA Denver's exhibition West of Center in 2011, and he was the subject of a retrospective exhibition, Clark Richert in hyperspace, at the museum in 2019. Richert's work as a member of the celebrated Trinidad, Colorado collective Drop City was featured in Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, which was presented at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; and the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley. His work can be found in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Wichita Art Museum, Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art, Denver Art Museum, the Kimpton Hotel Born, and the ART, a Hotel in Denver, among others.
Inspired by Mark Rothko’s use of color and Buckminster Fuller’s theories regarding the structure of the universe, Richert speculates about the nature of reality through paintings, animations, and prints. Exploring symmetry and quasi-crystal patterns found in nature and theoretical mathematics, he 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 and response to the basic content: that these artworks are postulations about the mysteries of reality.”
