Richard van der Aa

Richard van der Aa lives and works in Rouen, France. He was born in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1963.

Richard van der Aa’s practice has evolved from a minimalist focus on painting as object toward a post-minimalist exploration of image, observation, and place. Inspired by landscape and architectural detail, he uses a reduced visual language to capture fleeting moments and subtle narratives. Through an intuitive process, with attention to colour, composition, and surface, he creates paintings that reward sustained looking, balancing simplicity, complexity, and an enduring sense of surprise.

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.