Clark Richert

Clark Richert (b. 1941) investigates patterns found in mathematics and physics in his large paintings, sketches, and digital illustrations. Through his art practice, Richert draws scientific conclusions, some which predate discoveries later credited to the scientific community. This painting H-XE periods from 2001 and the accompanying drawings explore the structure of the quasicrystal, a non-periodic pattern that is ordered but does not repeat. In 2011, Daniel Shechtman was awarded a Nobel Prize for discovering this structure almost a decade after Richert created this painting.

Clark Richert was a founding member of Drop City, an artist community established just outside of Trinidad, CO in 1965. Considered the first artist commune in the United States, residents of Drop City, “Droppers,” embodied Buckminster Fuller’s most prolific idea—synergy—in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Participants lived and worked in “synergetic dwellings” made of geodesic domes and zonohedrons, which were fabricated by the artists themselves.

In 2019 Richert’s work was featured in a retrospective spanning two museums—the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Wichita Art Center, Denver Art Museum, Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Art, and many other prominent private and public collections. Richert received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He currently lives and works in Denver.

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

Submitted by Richard Levy Gallery