“Heinsohn’s colorful, dynamic paintings synthesize abstract expressionism, surrealism and conceptualism, and draw inspiration from artists like Goya, Rauschenberg and Duchamp to convey a singular astuteness, both aesthetically and conceptually, that grounds his work firmly in the contemporary.”

Melinda Baker, FOR USA TODAY NETWORK – TENNESSEE

Heinsohn holds a B.F.A. in painting and drawing from The University of Georgia. He moved to New York City in 1986 and lived and worked there for fifteen years. He has shown repeatedly in group shows with Allan Stone Gallery, most notable of which was the Summer Group Show of 1995 where he was included along with Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Eva Hess, Richard Estes, Robert Ryman and other notable artists. 

Allan Stone (1932-2006), well known as one of the world’s premier and most visionary collectors of art, collected Heinsohn's paintings and supported him extensively.

Richard currently lives and works in Nashville TN. In 2007 he received the "Critic's Pick" from The Nashville Scene for his solo exhibit, The Paradox of Change at Estel Gallery, which included his vibrant cratered paintings. He was also featured in The Tennessean for this exhibition, which raised questions about destruction, creation and transformation. 

Heinsohn's work has now been shown extensively and included in prominent collections. Currently represented by The Bill Lowe Gallery in Atlanta, he has also just been included in the permanent collection of Spain’s newest museum of modern and contemporary art, Museo Collection Roberto Polo in Toledo. 

Clearly visible in both the photo paintings and his newly developed Relational Abstractions, Heinsohn’s twenty first century work continues to reflect his long term commitment to conceptual abstraction as a reflection of the Anthropocene era, conjuring the sublime and the otherworldly into the context of chaos and cataclysm.

Heinsohn’s recent Relational Abstractions focus on developments in Neuroscience to rejuvenate concepts of viewer involvement, which were being explored by the displaced Abstract Surrealists in the late 1930s and early 40s. The goal of these works is to elevate consciousness by stimulating the imaginations of viewers, thereby increasing the collective levels of empathy within societal constructs. 

Heinsohn’s Time Frames are hybrids of photography and painting which examine the widely disproportionate nature of how we quantify and process time culturally and scientifically and how looking back through time pays a significant role in sociocultural evolution.

These works have been written about by Nashville Arts Magazine, ArtSocket Magazine and USA Today Network. A solo exhibition of Time Frames has been installed for Spring of 2020 in the art space at One Atlantic Center, in the iconic IBM Tower in Atlanta, Georgia.

Time Frames/2020

“Time is the most unknown of all unknown things.”

-Aristotle, 500 B.C.

“ But what is time?”

-Brian Greene, 2004 - New York Times

My work, TIME FRAMES integrates digital photography with painting and the appropriation of cinematic images to create pictures that conjure the sensation of looking simultaneously at various moments in time or looking through time.  

The layers begin within the photos, where some reflection and distortion have been included as part of the photographic process to impart the sensation of looking through a digitally generated veil of atmospheric haze. 

One element of particular significance is the image of a lamp, which appears in many of the works. This lamp is not part of the appropriated cinematic image but is actually in the room as the photo is taken and is being reflected from the television screen. The lamp, therefore, contributes to the digital distortion of light while also appearing connected to the narrative of many of the pictures.

The thickly applied paint in the works conjures notions of lava or a molten substance of a cosmic nature, therefore alluding to a more cosmological time frame and providing a proportional perspective into the nature of what we call “Time”.

Through the additive process of applying thick, viscous paint mixtures as well as other materials such as yarn and burlap, I strategically subtract from the narrative of the photograph, thereby creating a layered visual experience, which unfolds upon further viewing.

This layered visual amalgam speaks to the enigma of time and our inability to define it. Modern theories of quantum mechanics and relativity such as The Wheeler-Dewitt Equation, B-Theory, The Theory of Everything (Stephen Hawking), and Quantum Gravity, all suggest that the unifying of Relativity (gravity) with Quantum mechanics (matter) would render time into an imaginary construct.

Nonetheless, we depend upon time to define our lives and we look upon our past as a means of defining our future. Our entire global civilization is constructed of events that define who we are collectively as a human race.

Looking at various events and social constructs in retrospect has evolved into an innate and inherent means of sociologically navigating our way forward.

In many societies, socio-cultural constructs once considered fully sanctioned and appropriate, like public beheadings, slavery, and the oppression of women, have been uniformly condemned and considered barbaric. 

In Time Frames the goal is to reify the sensation of the inherent process of retrospection as a means of aesthetically reinforcing this tendency, which has long served our societal growth, and to do so optimistically, given that aspirations toward higher understanding dwell within the vast majority of us all.

This work raises culturally relevant questions about the connections between the nature of time and the unfolding of human sociocultural evolution. The photo-paintings are thusly, contemplative constructs, from which one can view the human condition through the lens of the geologic, the anthropological, the cosmological, and the surreal.

-Richard Heinsohn, 2020