Don Reichert

Who was Don Reichert?

Don Reichert was a Canadian artist. While primarily a painter in the abstract expressionist tradition, he was also notable as a photographer and digital media artist.

Donald Karl Richert was born in Libau, Manitoba in 1932 to parents who had immigrated from Austria. He studied art in Canada, Mexico, and England. He taught for many years at the University of Manitoba. Praised early on by the critic Clement Greenberg, Reichert has produced work that is held in many notable public, corporate and private collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, and the Canada Council Art Bank, among others.

Reichert's early work often combined the elegant brush-strokes of abstract expressionist painting with the techniques of color field composition. Other significant strands of his work center on black-and-white paintings resembling Asian calligraphy, or on the use of Latin American imagery, particularly skull imagery derived from various Latin American ruins. He is perhaps best known, though, for large canvasses painted out of doors.