Richard Roth Artworks

His practice is enriched by his interest in product design, product packaging, fashion, custom cars, and architecture. Roth's paintings reference contemporary material culture by featuring characteristics of modernism. His practice experiments with colour, shape, and form, and places an emphasis on process, material, and technique.

Box Paintings (2016–18)

Box Paintings (2016–18) are a series of small paintings that are made from birch wood boxes that measure 12 x 8 x 4 inches. Roth paints on five sides of each box, developing a format that creates vibrant, three-dimensional geometric compositions. Roth's Box Paintings blur the boundaries between sculpture and painting.

This series of artworks demonstrates Roth's interest in themes of play, form, and the quotidian. By using every possible surface as a canvas, Roth explores the unexpected possibilities of small and reductive forms. With each new painting, Roth unfolds new configurations that extend the limitations of painting as a traditionally two-dimensional medium.

3D Polychrome Object Paintings (2019)

Roth's 3D Polychrome Object Paintings (2019) are a series of works made from a prototype process. Roth drafts each painting by creating prototype panels to envision how each work will look in its final form as a polychrome object. This process allows Roth to develop ideas quickly and change his paintings' form and composition in the moment. Once he has discovered a prototype he is satisfied with, Roth carefully refabricates it on a new panel resulting in the final work.

Similar to Roth's Box Paintings, the 3D Polychrome Object Paintings demonstrate precise form and sharply painted blocks of colour. The three-dimensional nature of these works reveals subtle optical illusions that mislead and distort viewers' visual perception. Roth became interested in creating illusions from abstract art after observing the Ebbinghaus Illusion, an illusion of relative size perception discovered by the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus.