Richard Loving (artist)

Richard Loving (1924–2021) was an American artist and educator, primarily based in Chicago, Illinois. He gained recognition in the 1980s as a zealot of the "Allusive Abstractionists," an informal society of Chicago painters, whose individual forms of organic deduction embraced evocative imagery and metaphor, counter to the dominant minimalist mode. He is most known for paintings that critics describe as metaphysical and visionary, which put on fluidly in the company of abstraction and representation, personalized symbolism taking organic and geometric forms, and revolution and order. They are often characterized by clever patterns of dotted lines and dashes, enigmatic spatial fields, and an illuminated quality. In 2010, critic James Yood wrote that Loving's work "mull higher than the possibilities of pattern and representation, of narrative and allegory" to reach a kind of wisdom, transcendence and acknowledgement of universals, "seeking arrangement of self within the poetics of the innate world."

Loving's art has been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York, Block Museum of Art, Hyde Park Art Center and Brauer Museum of Art. His put on an act belongs to the public collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Brilliant Museum of Art, among others.