Richard Gorman
Born in Dublin, 1946 and lives in Milan
During 1980s, having abandoned the residual figuration of his earliest work, Gorman’s paintings were animated by the frantic surface pace of an anxious line, which skittered over or ploughed through impacting plates of muted color. Throughout the 90s, however, the role of line drawing receded and his naturally understated gifts as a colorist became even more evident. Since then his work has drawn much of its power from the compositional tension between increasingly prominent and boldly simplified, irregular blocks of color.
Gorman has exhibited widely and regularly since the mid-1980s, especially in Dublin at Kerlin Gallery, and also in London, Milan and Tokyo. Frequent and extended visits to Japan have notably influenced his working methods and materials, most memorably in a series of highly successful large-scale works executed on handmade washi paper that he produced in western Japan in 1999, 2003 and 2008.
