Contributed by Bill Arning / Few artists have painted with such purpose and energy over so many decades as Richard Bosman. Now in his early eighties, Bosman first emerged amid the East Village/Fashion Moda figurative painting boom of the 1980s alongside Stephen Lack, Judy Glantzman, Luis Cruz Azaceta, and the late Walter Robinson and Duncan Hannah—all of whom mined the collective image bank of Hollywood and advertising to create jarringly relatable narrative scenes.
Long-time Bosman watchers often recall his work as a firehose of imagery—gunfights and car chases, sinking ships, kidnappings, and robberies pouring out in rapid succession. Fans might therefore be surprised when entering his first solo show at Kingston’s beloved Headstone Gallery, a venue known for its ambitious program of younger artists. In inviting an older master like Bosman, the gallery has delightfully broadened its scope.
What makes this exhibition even more exciting is that Bosman has not offered a reprise of his classic themes, but rather a new body of work as subtle and conceptually tricky as his earlier paintings were direct and unfiltered. The 2025 series transforms humble cardboard and paint into trompe-l’oeil renderings of shipping boxes and produce cartons—from ubiquitous Amazon and DHL packages to crates of avocados, oranges, and tropical fruits.
Contribute to the Two Coats 2025 Year-end Fundraising Campaign!
In these works, Bosman gently reminds us that global trade—usually invisible—infuses even our fruit bowls with unseen narratives. How far has this orange traveled to arrive on our breakfast table? The cultural pressure to “eat local” collides with the desire for out-of-season abundance. The cheerful labels decorating the boxes, rendered with Bosman’s painterly wit, celebrate this infrastructure while hinting at its moral and environmental disquiet.
Bosman takes clear pleasure in recreating the folk-art style of fruit-box graphics—images rarely seen except by grocers unpacking them in the backs of bodegas before they’re discarded. Three stacked tropical fruit labels, for instance, could hang comfortably in the American Folk Art Museum. Works titled Product of China or Product of Chile take on new political resonance in our era of tariff brinkmanship, when even the price of an avocado feels like collateral damage from governmental folly.
The Amazon Prime envelopes carry their own sting. Few of us can participate in that billionaire-driven ecosystem without a pang of guilt. Bosman’s painted padded mailers, with their seductively crinkled surfaces, make us acutely aware of how normalized unthinking consumption has become.
Each piece is made from house paint on cardboard—literally of the material it depicts—echoing Rauschenberg’s flattened box works of the early 1970s. The tension between illusion and object is where the fun resides. The details of tape seams, label edges, and folds reveal Bosman’s mischievous hand, the trompe-l’oeil bordering on the cheerfully absurd.
Some pieces expand into narrative play. In Captain Bligh’s Search for Breadfruit, for example, a ship of pilgrims sails across a Bounty paper towel box, abutting another Bounty box featuring actual breadfruit imagery—a witty conflation of product branding, colonial botany, and cinematic myth. (Indeed, most commercially grown breadfruit today descends from specimens collected by Captain Bligh before the infamous mutiny.)
Elsewhere, three paintings of container ships evoke a folk-art sensibility and recall souvenirs from a port city. Their teetering stacks of cargo boxes become poetic symbols of the monumental, almost surreal choreography of global trade.
Bosman’s long engagement with printmaking resurfaces here as well. His editions with Brooke Alexander in the 1980s democratized access to his imagery, and at Headstone he continues that egalitarian impulse with two multiples—rum bottles and cigarette packs silkscreened on brown paper bags like those discreetly offered to conceal our indulgences. Sweet, luscious, and sly, they could have hung in The Times Square Show without missing a beat.
Some of the illusions are laugh-out-loud funny. Seven Seas Worldwide is a flat painting masquerading as an open, half-collapsed box waiting for recycling. Mailing Tube, leaned against the wall, looks as if the gallery had stashed away an errant shipping tube. Spending time in this show, one becomes newly aware of how thoroughly cardboard boxes have colonized our daily lives.
It’s worth recalling that less than a century ago, packaging as we know it didn’t exist—fruit came in raw wooden crates, unadorned. The weightless instantaneity of online shopping has made the box feel incidental, disposable. Bosman’s new paintings insist otherwise: that these containers form a material culture all their own, one that speaks volumes about our habits, values, and anxieties.
In turning the most forgettable debris of consumer life into objects of contemplation, Bosman has given us a body of work that is at once humorous, critical, and profoundly human.
“Shipping; Headstone Gallery,” 28 Hurley Ave, Kingston, NY, 12401. Through Nov 30. Fri – Sun. 12 – 5pm.
About the author: Bill Arning is a curator, critic, advisor, writer, and itinerant maker of pop up shows based in Old Chatham, New York.
Contribute to the Two Coats 2025 Year-end Fundraising Campaign!
13November2025
Dear Bill:
Nice piece about Richard Bosman @ Headstone Gallery! See much more work by the artist with Stewart & Stewart. https://www.stewartstewart.com/richard-bosman