Richie Culver (born Hull) is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting, music, performance and photography. He graduated from the Royal Collage of Art in 2023 on the MA painting programme.
https://2023.rca.ac.uk/students/richie-culver/
Culver’s practice is becoming increasingly difficult to pin down. The myriad of processes employed by the artist seem to act in criticism of one another, providing layers of discourse - a heavy, schizophrenic internal monologue concerned only with the eternal deconstruction of itself.
Discovering Art (with a capital ‘A’) after stumbling across a copy of Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency at an afterparty, Culver found that he understood the images. In the haze of skunk smoke, twisting conversation and creeping anxiety of the early morning there came a convalescence - Throbbing Gristle through a broken speaker talked in the same tongues as Goldin’s arresting photographs, situation as curator, jittering atmosphere provides the context.
Often when described as having a multidisciplinary approach, artists often utilise different mediums as a means of approaching the same concern. A sculpture of a painting, a performance to activate the space, a book of everything to take home with you.
Unique to Culver’s practice is the antagonistic relationship that each process seems to have both with itself and the other methodologies existing within the miasma.
Paintings seemingly designed with the express purpose of undermining painting elbow their way into the foreground, developing in layers against their will until brushing up against the edge of formalism: The swagger and sardonicism of the text giving way, submitting to its role as a formal device. In spite of themselves, they continue to exist - paintings in denial of painting.
Aesthetically, the paintings employ devices found in the work of artists like Kippenberger or Meese whilst equally echoing the process driven approach of Christopher Wool or Wade Guyton - albeit with the artist’s gesture acting in place of printer and stencil.
For all of their pomp and ardour, Culver’s paintings provide inroads both to viewers enamoured by their self-deprecation and mockery of art-world tropes as well as those taken in by their clear and coherent relationship to the history of painting.
Formally, the works are becoming increasingly aware of how they perform as paintings, with areas being reworked or removed entirely seemingly with the aim of creating a compositional harmony, or employing the rejection of one as an intentional device. Forever at odds with themselves, Culver’s paintings are cannibalistic, with particular phrases, shapes or styles piling on one another until they reach their point of expiration. Meaning isn’t derived, it’s squeezed until the fruit is dry.
The artist’s prolific sonic output exists in another field, taking influence from outsider music, experimental synthesis and Power Electronics to produce a body of work typified by stark use of minimal sampling and synthesis chewing on the often-modulated chunks of spoken word. His 2024 release Hostile Environments provides the output closest to music, employing use of ambient atmospherics and cut up melody as a backing to the increasingly effect-driven spoken word and sampling.
Performing live in a variety of settings, from squats and basement bars to Berlin Atonal or Camden Arts Centre, Culver takes the stage with a sort of ambivalence to his surroundings. Nowhere is ever perfect because it could be somewhere else, certainty is an enemy when you make a friend of clouded memory, undulating sense of self and the endless need to move and reasses.
Richie Culver (b. 1979, Hull) is a Multidisciplinary Artist based in London. His work transcends medium, treating material as a critical framework for broader discussion around themes of Labour, Identity and Mental Illness. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, including and earned his MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2023.
Text by Allan Gardner