"Trevor Richards: BYOG Project"
2004-07-16 until 2004-08-15
Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts
Perth, , AU

2004 will mark the 5th year of Trevor Richards’ BYOG project. Conceived as an exploration of four signature colours- blue , yellow, orange and green, this large body of work now comprises paintings, drawings, furniture, found objects, architectural interventions and photography. This long term project has in the vicinity of 300 individual components (and growing), and has the potential to be ‘one massive, immense and almost limitless megawork enlivened by abundant variations’. As a way of defining this project the artist will show selected works from the BYOG collection at PICA.

Over the last 5 years the general direction of his work has been related to connections between late modernist painting and popular/ mass culture. What interests Richards is the juxtaposition or merging of ideas connected with minimalism and popular culture. The repetitive and systematic, serial nature of the works in the show feeds off both tendencies, particularly as minimalism becomes integrated into contemporary mass culture and mass culture becomes conditioned to the industrial aesthetic. Thus the works can be simultaneously significant and trite, serious and playful, and accessible and inpenetrable.

Trevor Richards, 2004
(quote John Stringer, catalogue essay, 2003)

Trevor Richards has been making and exhibiting paintings since the early 1970s. One of Perth's most respected and influential artists Richards has managed to maintain a practice that has always challenged and questioned the stereotypes of image making. He has always looked beyond the obvious to the new and different and has been a strong and leading force in local painting practices. He has influenced many artists with his commitment to experimentation and the aesthetic experience.

http://www.goddarddefiddes.com.au

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