Richard Pitts creates paintings, collages, and large-scale sculptures that capture energy and movement in material form. Working in steel, aluminum, bronze, and wood, his practice spans six decades of exploring how art preserves the conversation between experience and consciousness. His work has been exhibited nationally and installed in public spaces from New York to Chicago.
Early drawings resurface in later collages; motifs disappear and return decades later; structures developed in the 1970s appear, transformed, in sculptures of the 2020s. Nothing is past. Everything remains in play.
My work, taken across six decades, behaves less like a sequence of styles and more like a single continuous organism that changes state but never changes identity. What appears at first as a shift—from drawing to painting, from painting to relief, from relief to sculpture—reveals itself, on closer examination, as a single evolving impulse.
My work doesn’t offer an image to be decoded—it presents a field of presence to be entered. The viewer’s perception becomes the organizing force. Their eye, their movement, their internal rhythm activates the forms.
My paintings are not views through a window. They are the view where the viewer is immersed by the atmosphere of a present. The viewer is both subject and object, both the experience and the experiencer. The viewer is the substance.
An aluminum ribbon sculpture can feel connected to a 1964 drawing and a Fragmented Memories collage can hold 1967 and 2025 without contradiction—because the underlying principle is the same: form as the ongoing expression of consciousness in motion.
The Art of Richard Pitts follows a lifelong pursuit of form — a movement through painting, relief, and sculpture in which experience itself becomes the art’s true subject.
Emerging from the vitality of New York in the 1960s, Pitts forged a visual language that bridges abstraction and figuration, always grounded in presence, rhythm, and perception. His art speaks truth to power — not political power, but the subtler power of habit, the habits that confine not only seeing but also experience itself.