Richard Anuszkiewicz was born in Erie, Pennsylvania. He attended the Cleveland Institute of Art and Yale School of Art and Architecture at New Haven, Connecticut, where Josef Albers taught at the time and became a decisive influence on the young art student. He became a leading figure of the Op Art Movement, and as early as 1964 Life Magazine referred to him as 'one of the new wizards of Op' (December 11, 1964 "Op Art." p. 132). In 1965, he was included in the exhibition The Responsive Eye at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, one of the first surveys of the Op Art phenomenon.
His painting style of sharply defined, juxtaposing lines and shapes of complementary colors, found its congenial expression in the print medium through the work of Luitpold and Michael Domberger. His screenprints are realized with such precision and dazzling colors that they seem to hover over the surface. The nine panels of Volumes RAm 2 can be installed and displayed in a variety combinations and patterns. Printing on PVC panels posed an unforeseen problem for the printers: once printed, the inks began to drip off the edges and had to be scraped away by hand once they had dried - on four sides of a total of 1,350 panels!
Richard Anuszkiewicz's works can be found in most of the leading museums in the USA, including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Art Institute of Chicago; Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas; Cleveland Museum of Art; Detroit Institute of Arts; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Conn.; and the Whitney Museum of Art, New York.