Richard Baker

Richard Baker (b. 1971) lives and works in Leeds, UK. Baker makes paintings depicting design objects, mid-century furniture, and increasingly, interiors. Often reimagined from found photographs, these unpeopled, modestly scaled works invite the viewer to consider the hidden human histories behind seemingly insignificant objects. Often overlooked, such objects bear witness to the lives lived around them, remembered, forgotten, or mythologised.

Rendered in oil paint, each painting undergoes a process of applying and removing paint in equal measure. Paint is built up in thin, carefully measured layers, before rags, sandpaper, and other tools are used to strip it back, disturbing the surface and disrupting those passages of controlled application. These alternating layers are revealed or hidden as they are painted over and scrubbed out, the surface accumulating a history of its own making and unmaking.

Seemingly dislocated and isolated, presented as unadorned formal arrangements, the objects in Baker's paintings restage the interrelationship between material, image, object, and time. Baker emphasises that these objects do not symbolise melancholy or loneliness. On the contrary, recording these traces is an affirmation of life — a way of capturing the passage of time, our interactions with the objects we choose to live with, and the act of creation itself.

Baker holds a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Leeds Metropolitan University and an MA in Creative Practice from Leeds Arts University.

Baker had his first institutional solo exhibition, Between Presence and Absence, at Huddersfield Art Gallery, Huddersfield, UK (2023). His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK (2009, 2012); the National Museum of Poland, Gdańsk, Poland (2019); the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, USA (2012); the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK (2018); the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, Tianjin, China (2017); and the Jiangsu Art Gallery, Nanjing, China (2017).

He was the recipient of the Discerning Eye Regional Prize for the North of England (2024), the Wells Art Contemporary Patron's Prize (2020), and The Hix Award (2019). He was shortlisted for the Jackson's Art Prize (2020) and was runner-up in the London Contemporary Art Prize (2019).

Baker's work is included in the Priseman-Seabrook Collection of 21st Century British Painting and is held in numerous private collections worldwide.