Robert Richardson

Robert Richardson began as a poet, concrete poet, and small press publisher. An interest in typography led to a degree in Communication Design at a London polytechnic. Following a teacher training course, he worked as a lecturer in the further education sector. During this time, he completed a Master's degree in Education, and subsequently became a Principal Lecturer in Communication at De Montfort University in Leicester, England. Since retiring from teaching, he has been a full-time artist and writer.

In the 1990s, while working as a lecturer in higher education, he artistically concentrated on text-based art and installations, exhibiting work at visual arts festivals in Liverpool and culminating in a solo exhibition at Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery.

In the first decade of this century, he worked mainly in photography and had a number of solo exhibitions, including in 2014 at the Museum of Classical Archaeology, University of Cambridge, and in 2018 at Museu Municipal, Faro, Portugal.

In 2014, he returned to text art and concrete poetry to prepare digital realisations of both earlier and new work for a solo exhibition at the gallery of Eugen Gomringer — known as the “father of concrete poetry” — in Rehau, Germany.

Since 2014 he has been working with digital art, producing an ongoing portfolio of abstract works, some issued as limited edition prints and others as NFTs. He works both with vector software on the desktop and with applications for tablets and phones, holding a strictness of form together with an intuitive approach; constructivism, abstract expressionism and psychedelic art all leave their trace. He has also been producing abstract animations, which has led to work being shown on screens in central Paris, in subway stations in São Paulo, and on one of the screens at Times Square in New York. His limited edition prints are made with established studios, among them Point101, whose clients include the British Museum and the BBC.

Robert Richardson is also known as an editor and author who has contributed to books on contemporary art and poetry. His work has appeared in Artists' Postcards: A Compendium (Reaktion Books) and Leeds Postcards (Four Corners Books).

His text art is held in many collections, including the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Gallery of Australia.