Richard Bosman “The Serial and The Cinematic”

Brooke Alexander Editions

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Brooke Alexander, Inc. presents a new exhibition exploring Richard Bosman’s use of sequential narrative and cinematic drama in his prints.

Starting with his emergence in the Neo-Expressionist movement of the early 1980s, Richard Bosman has made narrative-infused paintings full of mystery, drama and outright violence.

His subject matter is influenced by pulp fiction and film noir, and therefore his images contain a certain cinematic aesthetic. Bosman’s paintings are often large, rough-cut, gestural and impulsive. His style is as dramatic as his subject. The process of printmaking, however, is a slower affair. Woodblocks must be laid out, cut, and printed with a matrix. This more deliberate process lets the artist focus more on layouts, marks and colors.

Another hallmark of Bosman’s work is his technique of showing multiple images of the same scene, through time. In some, we feel as though we have caught a film-strip frozen in front of us. The image’s action can be the difference between one cell and the next. Other times, two or more cells can have only the slightest difference or change, implying that the “action” happens between the cells.

These aspects of Richard Bosman’s work invariably lead him to often work through thematic series. Separate artworks can feel as though they are points in a serial storyline, as if one needs to see all of them to get the complete picture. Bosman also enjoys playing with variations of images, such as colored versus non-colored. By presenting two versions of the same image side by side, we see Bosman thinking out loud, processing how color and detail enhance the dramatic and cinematic elements of pictures.