Richard Heinsohn is an American artist and musician who lives and works in Nashville, TN. He holds a B.F.A. in painting and drawing from The University of Georgia in Athens, GA, and an MFA from Belmont University in Nashville TN. For over a decade, Heinsohn has engaged concepts of how time is perceived in several bodies of work, including Time Frames, shown at One Atlantic Center in Atlanta, GA in 2020 and Time Frames/Critical Conditions, shown by Red Arrow Gallery in Nashville, TN in 2017. His work includes abstract painting, overpainted photographs, photography, wall reliefs, sculpture, video and sound.

Heinsohn was born in The Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee. His mother, Paloma Fleta, emigrated from Spain, giving up a successful career as a pop music singer to escape Franco. She took up painting and became a critical influence on Richard as a child.

In 1986 Heinsohn moved to New York City where he would live and work for fifteen years. In 1989 he gained the attention of renowned art dealer, Allan Stone (1932-2006). Well-known as one of the world’s premier and most visionary collectors of art, Stone collected Heinsohn's paintings and supported him extensively. At Allan Stone Gallery, Heinsohn’s work was shown alongside Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Eva Hess, Richard Estes, Robert Ryman and other notable artists from Stone’s collection.

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. This marked Heinsohn’s return to painting after several years of composing, recording and performing music. In 2023 he was awarded a full scholarship to the MFA program at Belmont University.

Heinsohn's work has now been shown extensively and included in prominent collections. He has been featured in Nashville Arts Magazine, Hyperallergic Magazine, USA Today/ Tennessee, The Nashville Scene and numerous other publications. His work is now included in the permanent collection of CRP, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Toledo, Spain and The Hudson County Foundation Collection in New Jersey.

In the words of USA Today art critic, Melinda Baker, “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.”

My work is rooted in expressing existential meditations through abstraction. The nature of my art is relational as opposed to demonstrative, inviting the viewer to participate in explication, and in so doing, decentering authorial intentionality. My mind dwells upon the confounding mysteries of temporality as part of the modern sublime, and these concerns drive my imagery into being. Although my focus comes from an existential place, I defer to the inferential capacity of the viewer to engage and speculate on meaning because I’m convinced that the best art experience includes some level of mystery and some sense of discovery. I often approach the human story through the lens of deep time and do this across a range of disciplines including abstract painting, wall reliefs, overpainted photos, sculpture and video.

Much of my work alludes to the climate destruction brought about by unregulated capitalism which has proven to be an explosive catalyst for inequity, political instability, extremism and multiple forms of social injustice. While responding to our complicated place in time as a civilization in turmoil, I also embrace above all else the value of an enigmatic art experience, a psychic journey, a moment of exploration for the mind.

Time has long been a point of fascination for me and shows up in various works. Working with rocks, which I regard as time capsules, provides a means for me to speak of deep time as I include them in various works. I also use parallel lines and stripes to reference geological time, inviting the observation that each striation in a geological formation represents millions of years. The circles in my paintings embody the wheel of time, or Kalachakra, as observed by Vajrayana Buddhism and other ancient belief systems that see time as cyclical rather than linear. These and other temporal associations convey how deep time provides us the perspective to see our own proportionally minuscule place in time and therefore to comprehend our collective vulnerability.

I’m consistently drawn to observing the macro in the micro. I see grids in tree bark and cosmic imagery in rock formations. The thrill that comes from examining these intriguing parallels provides a form of transcendence. Through abstract means, I visually celebrate unknowing as a reservoir for personal growth. I embrace notions of the sublime and the otherworldly as resources for our imaginations to transcend day-to-day routine, to stimulate the psyche. My intention is to elevate the perception of our collective place in space and time so we can see our shared concerns as humanity and behave accordingly, so we might perceive the associations of causation and consequence through time. I believe that art that matters in the future will be that which promotes the expansion of consciousness, the inevitable course of cerebral evolution and higher understanding.