Another highlight of the recent show of my work at Galerie Nathalie Obadia in Paris is this interview with Pierre de Montesquiou of Our Choices Art. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed giving it. This is a rare discussion of the familiar, the unfamiliar, and the familial in ways I have never quite gone in before.
Painting
"August," 2020 /
Robert Kushner, August, 2020, 72 x 72 inches, oil, acrylic on canvas
Since the beginning of quarantine waaay back in March, I have worked hard in the studio as my mental and spiritual salvation. At first the paintings were a continuation of their pre covid predecessors, Then a large bouquet of flowers intervened. Subsequently the works bounced back and forth between compositions of one or two huge isolated flowers and a complex, diverse cluster, a community of varied flowers. it has been a fascinating pendulum. This most recent painting, August, is in some ways a summation of summer itself, distilling the ideas of the various bouquet paintings into this one canvas. Sunflower, cosmos, zinnias, odd wild things whose names I don’t really know. It has finally occurred to me that my community of friends which has been relegated to isolation, has reformed itself in these bouquets. These are my friends, not literally represented, but in communion, brushing shoulders, celebrating their upward ascent and the abundance of summer.
Robert Kushner and Encyclopedia Britannica Cover Flower Series /
The Encyclopedia Britannica was considered the apex of scholarly writing. The Eleventh Edition of 1918 was generally the most comprehensive of them all. Many years ago I saved these volumes from being given away or trashed. But in our current age, they are no more than century old relics. And consequently their elegantly gold stamped leather covers have become the foundation for a series of paintings.
Robert Kushner, Calla Lily, 2018
They grew behind Aunt Sylvia’s house, untended. These miraculous waxen blossoms appearing out of the deep green tropical foliage ever summer.
Robert Kushner, Euphorbia, 2018
This plant has been with me constantly for nearly forty years, blooming every year, by now growing considerably taller than me, and patiently providing prima donna blossoms for a myriad of paintings over the decades.
Robert Kushner, Petunia, 2018
Such ubiquitous and silly summer bedding flowers, but when you look at just one blossom with their conic form and ruffles, they are amazingly complex.
Robert Kushner, Sunflower, 2018
Any flower painter has to deal with Sunflowers and their intense association with van Gogh. It is a challenge to make them my own.
Robert Kushner in conversation with Aliza Edelman /
Robert Kushner, White Gladiolus - Rainbow Sherbert, 2017.
Oil, acrylic, gold leaf, silk, embroidery, and sequins on canvas, 72 x 72 inches.
From Salome to Redouté
Robert Kushner in conversation with Aliza Edelman, Independent Curator and Critic
Wednesday, May 16th at 6:30pm
DC Moore Gallery
535 W 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
Please RSVP to skhosla@dcmooregallery.com
Please join Robert Kushner and Aliza Edelman for a lively discussion about the history of ornamentation and decoration. By revisiting the position of “Pattern & Decoration” as both a condition of modernism and as a vital contemporary art practice, they will address the intersection of fashion, dance, and performance as developed in Kushner’s early pieces from the 1970s, and the radicality of his new artworks’ engagement with surface materiality and narratives of textiles and cloth.
Q&A and reception to follow the talk.
Robert Kushner: Reverie: Duppata-topia on view at DC Moore Gallery through June 16
Robert Kushner at Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo /
Robert Kushner: “A Mist of Unknowing”
April 4 – 30, 2018
8/ ART GALLERY/ Tomio Koyama Gallery, Shibuya Hikarie 8F, Tokyo, Japan
Opening reception: Wednesday, April 4, 6pm – 8pm / Artist talk: 7pm
8/ ART GALLERY/ Tomio Koyama Gallery is pleased to present “Mist of Unknowing”, a solo show by an American contemporary artist, Robert Kushner.
Robert Kushner has gained much international recognition as one of the leading figures of the Pattern and Decoration Movement that began in New York in the late 1970s. He has established his idiosyncratic world where an aesthetic sense of West and East overlaps through the influences from European textiles, Fauvism’s freewheeling line which is exemplified by Henri Matisse, as well as Rinpa’s decorativeness. Kushner’s work combines rich colors with botanical forms depicted through freely painted organic lines, and abstracted geometric forms. His work harbors a deeply sensitive compassion toward living things amidst the bold and bright colors that tenaciously entice the viewer.
This exhibition features the artist’s recent works since 2010, which include botanical drawings on collages comprising pages from 19th Century lady’s magazines, dictionaries and Japanese woodblock books. The flowers and leaves upon these nostalgic materials, invite us to a timeless mist of unknowing.
Robert Kushner, Camelia Branch V, 2016, acrylic, ink and collage on paper, 99 x 66 cm
Robert Kushner at the Sarah Moody Gallery of Art, University of Alabama /
TRACERY AND PLANE: PAINTINGS BY ROBERT KUSHNER
SARAH MOODY GALLERY OF ART, UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA
February 8 – March 23, 2018
Gallery talk: Wednesday, February 7, 6 p.m., in the gallery
Reception: Thursday, February 8, 5-7 p.m., in the gallery
Robert Kushner, “White Lotus Shaft of Light III,” 2008, oil, acrylic, gold and silver leaf on canvas, 55 x 72 inches. Image courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York.
PRESS RELEASE
The 2018 Farley Moody Galbraith Endowed Exhibition features the work of internationally recognized artist Robert Kushner. Kushner will give a gallery talk about his work on Wednesday, February 7 at 6 pm in the Sarah Moody Gallery of Art, 103 Garland Hall on UA campus. A reception will be held Thursday, February 8, from 5 to 7 p.m. in the gallery.
Kushner (b. 1949) is an American painter known as a founder of the Pattern and Decoration art movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Kushner’s work combines organic representational elements with abstracted geometric forms in a way that is both decorative and modernist. Since the 1980s, he has used a full spectrum of color with gold, silver and patinated copper leaf to render the flowers and leaves, which have become his signature motif. “I never get tired of pursuing new ideas in the realm of ornamentation. Decoration, an abjectly pejorative dismissal for many, is a very big, somewhat defiant declaration for me,” he says. Kushner draws from multiple influences, including Islamic and European textiles, Henri Matisse, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Demuth, Ito Jakuchu, Qi Baishi and Wu Changshuo.
His work has been included in the Whitney Biennial and Venice Biennale and is in prominent public collections including Museum of Modern Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; National Gallery of Art; Corcoran Gallery of Art; Tate Gallery, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Honolulu Museum of Art Spalding House; Denver Art Museum; Uffizi Gallery; J. Paul Getty Trust; Ludwig Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia; and Philadelphia Museum of Art. Public commissions include sites in New York City, Tokyo, California and Washington, DC, as well as an 80-foot marble mosaic in the new Raleigh-Durham International Airport.
Installation Views
Robert Kushner Installation, Lobby Gallery, 375 Hudson St, New York /
ROBERT KUSHNER INSTALLATION
Lobby Gallery
375 Hudson, NYC 10014
(between Houston and King Streets)
Gallery Hours: Monday − Friday, 8 am − 6 pm
Opening Reception: Tuesday, November 28, 5-7pm
ON VIEW THROUGH APRIL 2018:
ROBERT KUSHNER, MIDNIGHT IN THE HUNTINGTON LIBRARY CACTUS GARDEN, 2014. OIL, ACRYLIC, AND GOLD LEAF ON CANVAS, 108 X 132 INCHES.
ROBERT KUSHNER, MALINALCO, 2014. OIL AND ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 90 X 120 INCHES.
ROBERT KUSHNER, SPRING SCATTER SUMMATION (TWO HALVES), 2005. OIL, ACRYLIC, GOLD LEAF AND GLITTER ON CANVAS, OVERALL DIMENSIONS 7 X 46 FEET.
Robert Kushner, Visitor, 2017 /
Robert Kushner
Visitor, 2017, oil, acrylic, gold leaf on canvas, 72×72 inches
The complex, convoluted nearly anatomical form of irises always gives me a linear challenge. in Visitor, the color is warm to hot, the lines are thin, and appear to disappear from time to time. The chevrons provide a further challenge to the complex forms of the flower petals.
