Richard Artschwager was born in Washington D.C. on 23 December 1923. He spent his childhood in New Mexico. As of 1941 he studied chemistry and maths at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., however, he was soon drafted into the military. Between 1942 and 1946 he served in the army in Europe and was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge. In 1948 he was able to complete his science studies and then attended the Amédée Ozenfant Studio School of Fine Arts in New York for two years. In the following years he worked as bank clerk, ran a small workshop and designed furniture. It was not before 1960 that he became exclusively active as a free-lance artist. Artschwager‘s works were shown to the public for the first time at the Art Directions Gallery in New York in 1959. In 1965 he had his first solo show at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, which was soon followed by many other national and international solo- and group shows, among them at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Nationalgalerie in Berlin and the London Tate Gallery, as well as at other renowned houses in Paris, Bordeaux, Basel and Hamburg. In 1980 Artschwager showed works at the Venice Biennial, between 1968 and 1992 his works were on display at the exhibitions Documenta 4, Documenta 5 and Documenta 7,8 and 9. The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York curated the first grand retrospective in 1988/89, which later also traveled to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Madrid, Paris and Düsseldorf. In 2005 he was awarded the Wolfgang-Hahn-Prize from the ‘Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst’ (Society for Modern Art) at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. In 2007 Artschwager received the Roswitha-Haftmann-Prize in Zürich. It took until one year before his death that he was elected full member of the National Academy of Design in New York. That same year the Gagosian Gallery in Rome showed his last solo show. Richard Artschwager died in Albany/New York on 9 February 2013.