A student of both Peter Voulkos and Robert Arneson, Richard Shaw was a leading proponent of the Super Object movement in California ceramics, known for its exaggeration of everyday objects. Inspired by eighteenth-century English Staffordshire porcelain and his fellow student Ron Nagle’s use of china paints, Shaw experiments with airbrushing, underglaze painting, and photo-silk-screening to ultimately achieve his signature trompe l’œil style. Shaw’s meticulously detailed still life sculptures address, in his own words, “a person memorializing their identity using the objects from their personal narrative… their pastimes, intellectual pursuits, sins, habits good and bad, obsessions, etc.” Shaw’s sculptures are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.