ARTIST BIO

Over the course of his prodigious forty-year career, Richard X. Zawitz has become a significant force across visual art, design, and innovative fabrication processes.

Driven by passion for improving human potential, Zawitz has crisscrossed these disciplines through a deep exploration into how material creativity can transform experience. With an emphasis on sculpture, the artist’s work compels us past individual experience towards new methods of perception, new orders of existence, new cosmos that encompass boundless creativity.
          Born in Pittsburgh—the birthplace of Andy Warhol  and epicenter of the American steel industry, two major influences in his oeuvre—Zawitz now shares his time between San Francisco and Hong Kong. Following a degree in Fine Art Sculpture and a double minor in Asian Art History and Asian Philosophy from the University of Hawaii, he traveled and studied extensively—specifically Japan, China, Thailand, India, Nepal, and Tibet. The global scope of these early experiences left a profound influence on his artistic practice and worldview. Hence, throughout his career, Zawitz has looked to ancient Eastern cultures for examples of how to create a spiritual connection between form and meaning.

          The Infinity and Tangle series, which provide the core of Zawitz’ inventive oeuvre, are composed through a sequence of pivoting 90-degree tangent angles. These works can be manipulated into an infinite array of shapes from the abstract to suggestively anthropomorphic.
          Articulated through an artistic movement that Zawitz has termed Curvism, the Tangle is an opportunity to physically engage with infinity via material form. Inspired by ancient design principles like those underlying the Tibetan Knot, Shodō calligraphy, vortex energy, and natural phenomena, Curvism is both innovative and profoundly familiar. Experientially, it is much more than a series of connected angles or curves. It describes our DNA, the undulating movement of waves, the great spiraling galaxies, and our ever-expanding universe. By expressing a state of constant approach, it portrays an epistemology free from limitations of linear time and space. His recent Infinity works merge futurism with mythology; scientific innovation with alchemy; and quantum physics with the language of archetypal symbolism.

          Zawitz’ artwork has been showcased in several solo exhibitions and is held in numerous private, public, and corporate collections internationally. Developed in the 1980s, the artists multiple,Tangle, has sold over 150 million editions to date. Research advanced through the Infinity series has proved significant to world-renowned astrophysicists and mathematicians, particularly those working in the fields of quantum entanglement, string theory, and knot theory.  In fact, in scientific circles, Tangles are known as Tangle Particles. Upcoming projects aim to monumentalize the Infinity series through public sculpture.