Richard Stankiewicz

Richard Stankiewicz (1922-1983) was one of the important American sculptors of the postwar era, whose inventive assemblages of found metal and industrial scrap secured him a substantial place within the second generation of the New York School. Born in Philadelphia, Stankiewicz spent his formative years in Detroit against the backdrop of America's booming midcentury automotive business. Growing up within a predominantly German and Polish immigrant community, he attended a technical high school where he studied mechanical drafting, volumetric geometry, engineering, art, and music, an unusual educational foundation that would prove essential to the sculptural practice he would eventually develop.

Stankiewicz began painting and making sculpture during his service in the United States Navy from 1941 to 1947. Following his discharge he trained under Hans Hofmann in New York from 1948 to 1949, absorbing the celebrated German-American master's principles of color, structure, and pictorial dynamism. His earliest sculptures were composed from metal scraps, and he experimented heavily with a wide range of found materials, allowing the discarded objects of the industrial world to become the primary vocabulary of his artistic practice. From 1950 to 1951 he attended the schools of Fernand Léger and Ossip Zadkine in Paris, financed under the GI Bill, extending his European artistic education while deepening his commitment to sculpture as his central medium.

Upon returning to New York, Stankiewicz joined the artists' cooperative Hansa Gallery, organized by former students of Hofmann. Through the 1950s he established his reputation there, earning wide critical acclaim for the witty and inventive junk assemblages that would become his signature contribution to American sculpture. His pieces transformed industrial cast-offs into anthropomorphic figures, whimsical creatures, and abstract compositions, and their combination of humor, formal intelligence, and material invention set them apart from more strictly serious postwar sculpture. He moved to the Stable Gallery in 1959, and in 1962 he relocated from New York City to Huntington, Massachusetts. He continued to sculpt and exhibit internationally until his death in 1983. His works are held in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, and other major American collections.