Richard Pitts

"Dahlia" Large-Scale, Abstract Aluminum Metal Sculpture in Yellow

2024

Richard Pitts was born in 1940 into a military family at Fort Monmouth, NJ. After high school he met his first art mentor, the well known sculptor, Ruben Kadish at the Newark College of Fine and Industrial Arts. He moved to New York and after a tour in Europe with the US Army, he graduated Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. He began exhibiting his art works in 1969. He was invited as artist in residence to teach at the Kansas City Art Institute from 1970 to 1973. Returning to his studio in Chelsea NY he had numerous one person shows. He taught in the Fine Arts Department at The Fashion Institute of Technology where he retired as a full professor. He now divides his time between his NY studio and his studio in rural Pennsylvania. Richard is represented in major museum and private collections across the country. A sculptor and painter, Richard Pitts works in many media, including steel, wood, bronze, and aluminum. His pieces are rife with energy and captured motion. Each seethes with potential and seems primed to spring to life at any time. Much like Abstract Expressionism, in Pitts' sculptures, movement replaces any suggestion of visual illusion, building upon his effort to physically abstract the notion of atmosphere or ambiance into a static, three-dimensional form. In 2001 Pitts began breaking down the painted figure into a series of panels that fit together in a puzzle-like fashion. This gradual separation of colors appeared five years later in a series of tall totem structures that reflected a variety of juxtaposing colors, patterns and textures, which were separated by a thick, undulating black line, echoing the construct of stained-glass windows. However in giving shape to a series of metaphysical characteristics that are rarely captured within figurative painting, Pitts has moved the idea of sculpture away from its multi-layered, object-based history and toward one’s personal mythology. His work explores the various metaphors inherent to the natural environment, suggesting that art is not only bridged with life but is also a product of it. In creating this new series of free-standing, abstract sculptures the artist lends form to the notion of placeless-ness, rendering a series of aesthetic intersections where personal narratives commune with the visual. Intended for both interior and exterior sites, Richard Pitts’ newest selection of colorful, metallic objects free up the art experience even further by utilizing the tenets of formalism to touch upon a deeper sense of “being” in the world. Pitts has expanded into the third-dimension by forging the drawn line into a single, hand-held object. Extending this idea onto a series of surfaces that echoes the thick, black line seen in his earlier work, the artist compiles a series of randomly tailored surfaces that connect with one another to represent either frosty, wall-hung, starburst shapes or tall, wing-like forms. His new sculptures are complex in that they symbolize time or, more simply, the thought or feeling of a particular moment.