Richard Tuschman

Richard Tuschman began experimenting with the digital image already in the early nineties, developing a personal style that combines photography, painting and assemblage. In his 2010 Still Life Montage series, the artist, who had always been passionate about still-life paintings, worked with the paintings he created, assembling them together with digital images, to create dreamlike and melancholic artworks. Two years later in his Young Adult series lonely women were portrayed in bucolic contexts. Initially some of these photographic paintings were born as ideas for novel covers. In 2012, he decided to make it a unitary project. Vintage fake photos were inspired by the masters of Danish painting from the 1600s.

With Once upon a time in Kazimierz, the artist’s poetry was perfected to become his recognizable brand. After visiting Krakow, his wife’s hometown, he imagined a Jewish family in the Kazimiers neighborhood in the 1930s. His photographs portrayed the daily life of this family; they show a strong emotional tension, because – even if not explicitly mentioned – the shadow of the Holocaust pervades the viewer’s eye and the artist’s intention. These are characters portrayed in ordinary situations, but we know the historical epilogue and the paintings seem to be crossed by a tragic sense of expectation.

In this series, Tuschman perfects his unique technique: he creates digital collages composed of scenography diorama photographs (miniature reproduction as small as a dollhouse), assembles them and in post-production puts them together with images of models, previously photographed on neutral backgrounds. In this way, the artist also started his latest work that had an international impact, Hopper meditations – photographic paintings inspired by the work of the artist Edward Hopper.

Tuschman is attracted by Hopper’s ability to tell the psychological nuances of the human condition, through rarefied and melancholic atmospheres and his camera angle, close to cinema and photography.

The images are built through the staging of scenes, the characters seem immersed in indefinite situations, like still-images of possible films, all in atmospheres markedly inspired by Hopper: elegant, metaphysical, intimate and surreal.

Tuschman’s work is similar to the gestation of a film where he takes on the role of director, producer, screenwriter and director of photography. So each project requires at least two years of work for the construction of the sets, the research of the models, the shots, the assembly and a long post-production time.

In his career, Tuschman has won, among other awards: Prix de la Photographie Paris, Critical Mass Top 50, International Kontinent Award. He has exhibited his works in the United States and around the world.

Lives and works in New York.

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