Economic Research: Brian Rice Artist

Wednesday 9 January 2013

Brian Rice Artist

The launch of the website Catalogue Raisonné represents the first complete cataloguing of Brian Rice's graphic work and celebrates almost 60 years of this major artist's activity. Rice's singular career covers a period of remarkable dedication and innovation as a successful and highly-productive painter and printmaker. This site catalogues the stylistic shifts in his printmaking and documents his visual language in a way that has not been seen before. Living in Somerset until he was twenty (1956), it was the period from 1962-1978 when he lived and worked in London that marked the formative years in this artist's career, strengthening both the conviction of his abstract work and his reputation. In 1978 Rice rejected London, its art scene and abstract painting and, buying a 50-acre farm in West Dorset, he immersed himself in farming – his only contact with the art world was teaching at Brighton Polytechnic. He did, however, continue to work slowly, developing a visual language that was part of a dialogue with the past, inspired by marks made by prehistoric man and the archaeology of the Dorset landscape. In1995 he had his first solo exhibition for 16 years, a point which marked Rice's renewed commitment to life as an artist.