Anticipation of Memory

We choose furniture in anticipation of the life we'll live around it. We picture where the sideboard will stand, the books and photographs we'll place, the morning coffee and evening drink we'll put on it. We take our measurements in the empty space, and imagine, before it has happened, the memory we're about to make.

Richard Baker paints this same anticipation, one step removed. Anticipation of Memory brings together paintings made over the past decade, each one a way of owning something before, or instead of, having it. Baker began this body of work after moving house, newly preoccupied by trawling websites in search of furniture. He was struck by the strangeness of the eBay listing photos he found — chairs dragged into gardens or sideboards squashed into hallways for a hurried photo — drawn to their makeshift, accidental compositions. Painting them became a way of possessing what he couldn't buy or no longer had space for.

He returns to these compositions again and again, in the historical tradition of artists who fix on the same recurring objects — Giorgio Morandi and his bottles come to mind — until the furniture stops being furniture and starts to function as a visual vocabulary. They are pieces he can arrange and rearrange, building and dividing each composition from the same recurring parts. Much of it is mid-century furniture that has already lived through one life, fallen out of fashion, and been rediscovered. It is pulled from attics and restored, becoming desirable again. The photographs he paints from have that same second-hand quality, already once removed from the object itself, a kind of reproduction.

In his newest work Baker has started to look to the present, rather than the past, for inspiration. Orange Bench (vis-à-vis) features the work of contemporary designer Charles O. Job. Baker's vocabulary has also begun to widen beyond the object itself and into the space around it. Interiors and architecture form the backdrop of his new compositions, as in Black Chair, which developed from a recent Richard Parr Associates project in Oxfordshire. This expansion has, quite literally, grown his canvases too, from the small, handheld panels he still returns to, toward a new, larger scale.

Two earlier works, Aviary Place and Languish (Vesper Walk), painted a decade apart, both look out through dappled curtains in different houses Baker has lived in. They are the same memory, carried from one home into the next. The furniture we live with often outlasts the moments we first imagined for it. Baker's paintings carry this same anticipation forward, waiting for whichever room, whichever life, they end up in next.

About the Artist

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 Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK (2018); 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), was runner-up in the London Contemporary Art Prize (2019) and was an exhibitor in the John Moores Painting Prize (2018).

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

Richard Baker, Anticipation of Memory