His first pieces were wooden boxes veneered with Formica to create the images of furniture. His sculpture Portrait II (left) was shaped like a bedroom dresser, but it had no drawers and had a sheet of Formica in place of a mirror; his Description of Table (on the cover) appears to be a table, covered by a white table cloth. He viewed these pieces as collages: “They’re not sculptural. They’re more like a painting pushed into three dimensions. It’s a picture of wood.” In some cases, he would used Formica with a wood grain; in others, we would hand paint the wood grain. He called this process of alteration “warping.” By covering a wood surface with an imitation of wood (in paint or with a veneer of wood-grain patterned Formica), he is “painting what is already there in the place where it is.” He described this as “useful furniture with an overlay of representation.” This work was hailed as crossing between Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptualism. He did not fit into any specific category, and this shot him to the forefront of the art world. He went on to produce variations on the forms of chairs, tables, doors, pianos, and other domestic objects, in styles ranging from severely geometric to surrealistically distorted and skewed. “It's about the paradox of furniture. Take a chair. If you sit on it, it is just a chair. But if you look at it, it can be a piece of art. The fact that the sculpture of a chair is a tad too big says ‘look at me.’” In the case of Organ of Cause and Effect III (left), he creates an organ that hangs on the wall. Its foot pedals, five giant keys, and five flattened pipes represent only part of the whole musical instrument. It would be impossible to play—for instance, the foot pedals project forward, but they are too close to the keyboard and the keys and pipes don’t actually work. The main feature of this instrument is its silence. In the 1990s, Richard made a series of sculptures in the form of shipping crates, representing the new internationalization of art, where at any given moment thousands of artworks (and artists) are in transport. Then, there was punctuation (exclamation marks, question marks, brackets) in materials both hard and soft; fuzzy geometric forms or figural reliefs crafted out of stiff rubberized horsehair, and “blps” of varying scale appearing surreptitiously in galleries and parks, and on city streets and skylines. He even found time to return to the more traditional furniture forms, as seen in Chair/Chair and Tower III (right). He summarizes his career by say: “Art is uselesslooking, its activity or production [has] no purpose, certainly not to make a living. I would wake up at night and think, ‘What the hell have I gotten myself into? You don’t want to do that! But you gotta do somet ???~( ??Bv?F?'B?F?W&^( ?2g&VVF???( ?F?R&?6?&B'G66?vvW"&WG&?7V7F?f^( F6???rF?F?RT4????W"?W6WV???V?Rb?6WB??( F?V?VBBF?Rv??F?W??W6WV????Wr??&??7Bf????B6??6?7G2?b?fW"CRv?&?2?b67V?GW&R???F??r??BG&v??r?'&??v??rF??v?BF?RW?G&?&F??'?'&VGF??Bf?&?????26&VW"?f?"??f???F?RW???&?F????B76?6?FVB&?w&?2?f?6?BF?RvV'6?FS?wwr????W"?V6??VGR?"6?â?3?CC2?s?????V?R?#0?v??Gv?&?W"vW7@?vRSP???6??"?6??"&VB???f?&?6?6?v??FR???FVB7FVV??C"??C"r?SB"B???F?vW"????6??fW76???????f?&?6?c"??Cr"r?3""B???7?GFW"V??V???v??B?f?&?6?C""??S2"r?3?"B???