Richard MacDonald American, b. 1946

Richard MacDonald was born in California and has spent more than 25 years creating a body of work that has changed the contemporary understanding of Figurative sculpture. Among his greatest achievements are historically significant public monuments, such as the 26-foot bronze sculpture The Flair which was installed at Georgia International Plaza in Atlanta, for the Olympic Games in 1996, where it still stands today. In 2000 Richard MacDonald created the 15-foot tall bronze called Momentum to celebrate 100 years of the U.S Open, which was held at Pebble Beach, where the piece is permanently installed. Currently, Richard MacDonald is creating a monumental piece for The Royal Ballet School in London, a project that has taken several years, and will culminate in a multiple figure Grand Coda to commemorate the founder of The Royal Ballet, Dame Ninette de Valois. In addition to these, and other publicly installed works, Richard MacDonald has been included in the private collections of distinguished patrons around the world. Richard MacDonald is best known for his figurative sculpture, but he has won honors as a painter, and for his works in a broad range of mediums, creating several different genres within the body of his work. By founding a studio in Monterey, Richard MacDonald has given himself a base for his involvement with the development of the arts, through mentoring programs, workshops for artists from around the world, and his efforts to promote the therapeutic benefits of art education for underprivileged children. As a true visionary, Richard MacDonald emerged from a century that avoided the realistic depiction of the human form, not by returning to the past understanding of figurative sculpture, but by synthesizing modernist principles with the timeless human desire to understand ourselves. Richard MacDonald has approached the human form as a way to make expressive statements about the human psyche, by creating imaginative metaphors for states of mind: states of “being”. What is “real” to us as human beings has many dimensions: there are spiritual realities and emotional truths that can best be expressed through the beauty of the human form, and Richard MacDonald is master of this new visual language. To paraphrase Picasso: there is no such thing as “abstract” art; everything starts from what is known. Richard MacDonald is one of the few post-modern figurative sculptors to go back to this essential truth, and create imaginative metaphors of the human psyche through representation of the body.