Ben Luke
speaker
1,919 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 1 Sep
Ben Luke’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Pushing and pulling between different forms and modes and between two and three dimensions, he's developed a singular response to architecture, which is often activated in unexpected ways by the placement of the objects he makes and their arrangement in spatial compositions.
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And while the meaning of the works is often as elusive as their form, they offer poetic enticement for their audience through a delight in broad and often humble materiality and a fertile relationship with different forms of language.
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Richard is seen as a leading figure in post-minimalism and certainly contributed to the liberating approach to form, matter and content that that tendency heralded from the 1960s, but any attempt to neatly categorise his output feels profoundly inadequate and limiting.
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Experiencing his exhibitions, one feels part of a philosophical response to the world, a questioning of what it is to inhabit it and what it might mean to make art in it, and an open sense of dialogue.
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As Richard himself said in 1975, if the artist does a piece of real work and we see it, it's as though we ourselves are doing it.
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Richard was born in 1941 in Rahway in New Jersey and grew up in nearby Roselle.
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Today he lives and works in New York, Abiquiu in New Mexico and Mount Desert in Maine.
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He studied at Trinity College in Hartford in Connecticut between 1959 and 1963.
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While at Trinity, he made formative visits to the Wadsworth Athenaeum, the museum in Hertford, and formed a friendship with its recently hired curator of paintings, Sam Wagstaff, who, in 1964, curated Black, White and Grey, regarded as the first exhibition exploring minimalist art.
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Through Wagstaff, Richard was introduced to a dynamic and at that point growingly disparate contemporary art scene.
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Weekends were spent in New York, he recalled, witnessing the birth of pop and the classic period for happenings and meeting the artists at that time.
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After leaving Trinity, he made what are widely regarded as his first mature works, the Untitled Paper Cubes of 1964.
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Made from plain cardstock and all 7.5 centimetres on each side, the cubes are perforated with different shapes, some resembling letters,
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a trait that's continued in his work up to today, others creating simple geometric apertures like triangles and rectangles within the cubic form.
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That same year, Richard began a job as an assistant at Betty Parsons Gallery, a leading New York avant-garde space.
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Within a year, he had his first show at the gallery.
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that 1965 exhibition introduced his constructed paintings all of which began with drawings from which he created a template to cut the shapes out of two thin sheets of wood retaining the drawings uneven organic line which he then joined with strips of wood at the sides he then painted each one in uniform color
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applied in many layers to achieve the right intensity of hue.
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Again, certain forms resemble letters, others some form of pictogram or symbol, but it's always been important to Richard that he tries, in his words, to make something that looks like itself, avoiding clear reference to specific bodies, objects or places.
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These, and the works made in the following decade, have provided the kernel for Richard's remarkably broad output over more than 60 years.
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Showing 301–320 of 1,919 · page 16 of 96
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