Curatorial Statement

Stiller Zusman, Gallery Curator, Kitchen Theatre Company
Richard Seehausen is a painter whose figures are larger than life. We are faced with a portrayal that is both timely and personal. German Expressionism, Pop Art, advertising, and the news media have all eclectically influenced Seehausen’s postmodernist sensibility. “The images are appropriated and manipulated, altered to render a moment, totally divorced from the original intent.” Catholic Girls combines a Newport cigarette advertisement with several Popes emerging from the ocean. In Dimock Water, the polluted jug is shown repeatedly, challenging us to pay attention to the environmental poisoning caused by fracking. In these paintings, there is no pretense of finery, just a fierce edge and an intentional gaze. Unexpected layers of patterns and marks, seemingly impulsive choices, fall together into raw and sometimes tender images.

 

On the opposite wall of the gallery, Richard takes a different tack, paying homage to his artistic influences with a series of 70 portraits of contemporary artists. These include Francis Bacon, Basquiat, Lucian Freud, Marisol, and Ai Weiwei, among many others. The long parade of faces alludes to the continuous history of thinkers and image-makers whose work illuminates and changes the culture.

Richard Seehausen Biography
Richard Seehausen was born in Indiana and raised in upstate New York. He lived and studied in Buffalo, where he showed at Hallwalls Gallery and the Albright-Knox. Seehausen received the grand prize in the 1981 Buffalo Evening News “Centennial Exhibition,” and his work was included in the prestigious “Image Scavengers” exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia.

He was represented by the Monique Knowlton Gallery in Manhattan until it closed in the late 1990s. In 2001, Seehausen moved to the western Catskills and began exhibiting at the Catskill Art Society in Livingston Manor, NY (now Catskill Art Space); the Nutshell Art Gallery in Lake Huntington; and the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance in Narrowsburg, where he had a solo exhibition in 2011. In 2017, the Burchfield Penney Art Center acquired his painting American Vacation for inclusion in their “50 in 50 – Fifty Works for Fifty Years” collection. At the end of 2023, Seehausen moved back to Buffalo, where he lives and works in the Riverside community.