Richard Francisco
American, Born 1942
Richard Francisco grew up in Napa Valley, California, and spent his post-school years traveling through Europe. In the Netherlands he decided to start pursuing art seriously. Moving back to the United States in 1967 he established himself in New York City and began a period of self-education and experimentation among the artists there. During 1972 he met the Vogels who befriended him. Over the next decades of this friendship they would assemble a large collection of his work. Like Richard Tuttle, he is represented in every branch of the Vogel 50x50 collection. By 1973 he was holding his first solo show at the Betty Parsons Gallery. Initially working in flat wood sculpture and watercolor on paper, he came over time to combine the two media, though he still refers to the works as drawings or paintings. “I would rather build a drawing than draw a drawing,” he explained in a catalogue for an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1980. Ruth Fine, writing about the 50x50 project, refers to his “innovative post- minimalist approach.” His works have been exhibited in the United States and Europe, particularly at the Annemarie Verna Galerie in Switzerland where he has been holding group and solo shows since 1979. Norway staged a Francisco retrospective at the Stavanger Kunstmuseum in 2007. The San Francscio Museum of Modern Art, the Delaware Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, all have his work in their collections.