Richard van der Aa

Richard van der Aa lives and works in Rouen, France. He was born in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1963. After studying painting at the Ilam School of Fine art (University of Canterbury) and graduating in 1985, he moved to Sydney, Australia where he completed a Master of Fine Arts at COFA (University of NSW). From 1998 to 2004 van der Aa was Faculty Head of Visual Arts at the School of Creative Arts, Oxford Falls, Sydney. In 2005 van der Aa moved to Paris, France. In 2009, he and his wife Anna established ParisCONCRET, a non-profit association and exhibition space for the dissemination of reductive abstract art. ParisCONCRET is international in its scope and has showcased the work of artists from around the world. In 2012 van der Aa was elected to the steering committee of the Salon Réalités Nouvelles (French Association of Abstract artists founded 1946). Since 2015 he has dedicated his time to his artistic practice. He presented his first solo exhibition at the C.S.A. Gallery in Christchurch, NZ in 1985. His work has since been exhibited in Australia and New Zealand, and in more recent years, in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Poland, the U.K., the Ukraine and the USA. A recurring concern in van der Aa’s work is to locate his painting at the point of tension which exists between object and image. Put another way – he tends to work in the space between figuration and abstraction.