Richard Heinsohn 2025
Richard Heinsohn was born in The Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee. His mother, Paloma Fleta, emigrated from Spain, giving up a successful career as a pop music singer to escape Franco. She took up painting and became a critical influence on Richard as a child.
Heinsohn holds a B.F.A. in painting and drawing from The University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, and an MFA from Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. Primarily focused on painting and wall reliefs in his early years, his work has more recently evolved to embrace a range of disciplines including photography, sculpture and video. Heinsohn also plays writes and performs music.
In 1986 Heinsohn moved to New York City where he would live and work for fifteen years. In 1989 he gained the attention of renowned art dealer, Allan Stone, who included him in several group shows at Allan Stone Gallery, most notable of which was the Summer Group Show of 1995. In this show Heinsohn was included with Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Eva Hess, Richard Estes, Robert Ryman and other notable artists from Allan Stone’s collection.
Allan Stone (1932-2006) well known as one of the world’s premier and most visionary collectors of art, collected Heinsohn's paintings and supported him extensively. Following the passing of Allan Stone, Heinsohn was represented by The Bill Lowe Gallery in Atlanta for twelve years.
Richard currently lives and works in Nashville TN. In 2007 he received the "Critic's Pick" from The Nashville Scene for his solo exhibit, The Paradox of Change at Estel Gallery, which included his vibrant, cratered paintings. He was also featured in The Tennessean for this exhibition, which raised questions about destruction, creation and transformation. This marked Heinsohn’s return to painting after several years of composing, recording and performing music. In 2023 he was awarded a full scholarship to the MFA program at Belmont University.
Heinsohn's work includes abstract paintings, wall reliefs, hybrids of painting and photography, drawings, sculptural works, video and soundscapes. He works with burlap, found and appropriated objects and has been noted for his thickly textured, cratered surfaces. Conceptually, his work has consistently addressed deep time with themes of retrospection and ideas of post history. Recent works have specifically focused on anthropogenic transformation and the distant future, exploring deep time through the geological lens. He has also worked extensively with color, texture, illusory space and ambiguity of form in numerous abstract works centered on affect and the experiential as phenomena which trigger imaginative stimulus.
Heinsohn's work has now been shown extensively and included in prominent collections. His paintings and Photo-paintings have been included in shows alongside Thornton Dial, Herbert Creecy, Michael David and others and his short film, Hydroshpere was screened in Nashville’s Microcinema Film Festival in May, 2025. He has been featured in Nashville Arts Magazine, Hyperallergic Magazine, USA Today/ Tennessee and numerous other publications. His work is now included in the permanent collection of CRP, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Toledo, Spain and The Hudson County Foundation Museum in New Jersey.
In the words of USA Today art critic, Melinda Baker, “Heinsohn’s colorful, dynamic paintings synthesize abstract expressionism, surrealism and conceptualism, and draw inspiration from artists like Goya, Rauschenberg and Duchamp to convey a singular astuteness, both aesthetically and conceptually, that grounds his work firmly in the contemporary.”