Abstraction, architecture and the everyday in the recent work of Trevor Richards

The French philosopher Jacques Rancière highlights the restricted basis of modern art, the idea of artistic independence framing all ways of making, seeing and judging art in modernity. Certainly, most theories of modernist abstraction represent art as something to be experienced in and of itself, but the idea that art should conform to a single possibility and direction collapsed decades ago. Current societies are formed around differentiation, diversificationand distributed systems, people's sense of the specificity of their needs and desires increasingly driving contemporary society in contrast to the uniform, centrally-imposed standards and processes that emerged in modernity. Indeed, Trevor Richards's current work shows that contemporary abstraction involves wide-ranging renegotiation of modernist models, leading to unforeseen, particular and distinct outcomes in the work of individual artists.