Richard Stankiewicz

Richard Stankiewicz was a pioneering American sculptor widely regarded as a central figure in the development of junk sculpture and assemblage art in the postwar United States. Born in Philadelphia and raised in Detroit, he studied under Fernand Leger and Ossip Zadkine in Paris during the late 1940s, experiences that profoundly shaped his understanding of modernist form. Returning to New York, he became a key presence in the downtown art scene and co-founded the Hansa Gallery in 1952, an artist-run cooperative that served as an early incubator for avant-garde work in the city.