Robert Russell
“The thinking is that we earthly human beings are asking anyone above our skies (a God is implied here) to forgive all of us for the way we treat human beings. The ask here is to, in a way, hover above our actions as for profit prison wardens, voters, complicit participants, etc and view what we are doing as a society from above. The text is reversed and flipped so as to be read only from that vantage point. It’s also a play with the Renaissance idea of the Grand Manner where largely illiterate viewers would enter a church and feel elevated by the vantage point of the paintings on the walls.”
BIO
Robert Russell, (born 1971), lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He completed his MFA at The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 2006. Russell earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Through the use of a frequently subdued color palette, Robert Russell’s representational paintings explore concepts of identity, memory, desire and authenticity. Often self-referential in nature, existential questions regarding the role of an image and the process of memory and imagination arise. Themes include (among others) art books, portraits of Robert Russell that are not the artist, pigs, children and most recently clouds. With his most recent cloudforms, Russell both holds on to his past and expands on it. His previous two exhibitions"Book Paintings and Revisits" explored the visual tropes of the artist monograph and continued his conceptual interest in authority, authenticity, and iconography. Recent solo exhibitions include Anat Ebgi Gallery, The Cabin LA, LA><ART (Los Angeles), François Ghebaly Gallery (LA), Osmos (New York, NY) and Burrard Arts Foundation (Vancouver, BC Canada) where he was also an artist in residence. He has been included in numerous group shows in Los Angeles including Roberts and Tilton Gallery, Material Press MOCA LA and M+B Gallery.
OWN WORDS
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