Please enjoy this Zoom conversation with Jenelle Porter recorder on May 13, 2021.
Robert Kushner: I ❤ Matisse runs through June 19, 2021
at DC Moore Gallery.
DC Moore Gallery
Robert Kushner's 'Orient Express' at ArtBasel Miami /
Robert Kushner, Orient Express, 1982, acrylic and mixed fabric on cotton, 100 x 130 inches
Now on view: ‘Pattern & Decoration Continuum: Valerie Jaudon, Joyce Kozloff, and Robert Kushner’ at the DC Moore Gallery booth at Art Basel Miami Beach. The fair is open to the public through Sunday, December 8.
Robert Kushner: By My Window opens October 10 at DC Moore Gallery /
OCTOBER 10 - November 9, 2019
Opening Reception with the artist: Thursday, October 10th, 6 - 8pm
DC MOORE GALLERY
535 West 22nd Street, NY, NY 10011
Hydrangeas (Diptych), 2019, oil, acrylic, and gold leaf on canvas, 72 x 144 inches
ROBERT KUSHNER: BY MY WINDOW
- from the press release -
Robert Kushner’s ongoing fascination with decorative and modernist traditions, the use of fabric as a form of cultural expression, and the interfacing of ‘high’ and ‘low’ traditions is evident in this sumptuous exhibition of new paintings. Robert Kushner: By My Window October 10th – November 9th finds the artist in a complicated dialogue with the traditions of pure painting as well as a conversation with the artisans who created traditional textiles. This body of work also references his own early fabric installations and performance work from the 70s and early 80s. A catalogue will accompany the exhibition, with an interview by Manuela Ammer - curator mumok, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftlung Ludwig Wien — with Robert Kushner.
The Queen in her Boudoir, 2019, oil, acrylic, and gold leaf on canvas, 72 x 72 inches
At this moment in time, the issues brought up by the 1970’s Pattern and Decoration Movement, of which Kushner was a principal proponent, are newly relevant and essential. Global awareness, feminist inquiry, and traditions of the decorative have led to a re-examination of the ideals and concepts of the original P & D artists.
Kushner’s work will be featured in the upcoming Art Basel Miami Beach 2019 art fair along with those of artists Valerie Jaudon and Joyce Kozloff in a themed presentation Intrepid Guile: Pattern and Decoration Continuum. This presentation examines these artists’ early expressions and the ways they each have decided to integrate pattern and decorative content into their ongoing work.
Most recently, Kushner’s work has been included in several national and international museum exhibitions focusing on the Pattern and Decoration movement: Pattern and Decoration: Ornament as Promise at Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany, and Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung, Vienna, Austria; Pattern, Crime & Decoration at MAMCO, Geneva, Switzerland, and Le Consortium, Dijon France; Les Chemins du Sud (The South Ways) at Musée Regional d’Art Contemporain, Serignan, France; Less is a Bore: Maximalist Art and Design at Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; and With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA.
Anemone Bouquet, 2019, oil, acrylic, and gold leaf on canvas, 72 x 72 inches
The artist states about his primary subject, "Flowers are always monumental, never trivial. They always bear witness to memories--flowers in our past, flowers casually encountered, sources of beauty, of nostalgia. Whether these recent compositions are anchored by the elaborate repeating patterns and textures of Indian textiles, or relate to floating fields of transparent colors, the flowers assert their importance and dictate the compositions. I want these paintings to be unapologetically decorative, celebrating a mixture of expansiveness, openness, and complexity. Color, line, drawing are the major elements in my painterly repertoire. My new works in this exhibition demonstrate a sense of grandeur, simplicity of composition and exploration of unexpected color harmonies.”
Robert Kushner’s works are included in many prominent public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Tate Gallery, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; The Con-temporary Museum, Honolulu, HI; Denver Art Museum, CO; Galleria Degli Uffizi, Florence; J. Paul Getty Trust, Los Angeles, CA; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA.
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, “Reverie: Dupatta-topia,” at DC Moore Gallery /
Robert Kushner, Calla Lilies and Roses, 2018
Oil, acrylic, gold leaf, embroidery, sequins, silk on canvas, 72 x 72 inches
Robert Kushner: Reverie: Dupatta-topia
May 3 – June 16, 2018
Opening Reception on May 3rd, 6-8pm
DC MOORE GALLERY, 535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
Robert Kushner, White Gladiolus, Chocolate Dupatta, 2017
Oil, acrylic, gold leaf, silk, embroidery, and sequins on canvas, 72 x 36 inches.
FROM THE PRESS RELEASE: Robert Kushner’s new paintings are a radical departure from his recent work, while harking back to some of his earliest paintings on fabric from the 1970’s and 80’s. This body of work taps into the issues of embellishment and beauty in art that is ever-present in his paintings. For the first time, Kushner is collaging fabric to canvas before adding paint and gilding. The fabrics, mostly silk, come from India, Japan, and Uzbekistan. The flamboyance, sparkle, elegance and technical mastery of all
of these materials, particularly the Indian embroideries known as dupattas, are endlessly fascinating to Kushner. The textiles are adhered to the canvas or panel, allowing hints of hidden embroidered portions to show through the layers of paint, gilding and collage. This results in a complex surface that could not be created in any other way. This over-the-top richness allows Kushner to continue his explorations of elaborate, dense surfaces and compositions, and to wryly ask, “Is more enough?”
Kushner is seeking a balance between the ornamentation on the dupattas he uses and his own depiction of floral and geometric structures. His use of the fabric’s design, combined with underlying replicating grids, allows him to examine and express the idea of patterns as the substrate of our cultural experiences. The result is a lyrical fusion of Eastern and Western styles and this multiplicity of forms, the extensive layering, and diverse palette allows the mood of the pieces to vary from buoyant and a little giddy, to somber and severe.
Kushner first visited India in 1978, where he worked with a family of Rajasthani appliqué artists that changed his studio practice completely. He is interested in the handmade qualities of the textiles which offer a human trace to the paintings. He is also drawn to the sense of inclusion, not reduction, present in India’s textiles as seen in the richness and vibrancy of his compositions.
Read about the show:
May 3, 2018: ArtDaily: DC Moore Gallery Opens Exhibition of Works by Robert Kushner
May 7, 2018: Blouin Artinfo: Reverie: Dupatta-topia by Robert Kushner
May 25, 2018: Artforum Critic’s Pick: Robert Kushner DC Moore Gallery
June 11, 2018: Blouin ArtInfo: ‘Reverie Dupatta-topia’ by Robert Kushner at DC Moore Gallery
Robert Kushner: Portraits and Perennials at DC Moore Gallery /
Thanks to all who attended the Opening of “Portraits & Perennials” on a cold and snowy evening, Thursday, February 9th. The show continues through March 11 at DC Moore Gallery.
Please stop by.
Robert Kushner: Portraits & Perennials at DC Moore Gallery, February 9 – March 11 /
Please join me at DC Moore Gallery for the Opening of “Portraits & Perennials.”
Thursday, February 9th, 6:00-8:00 pm
The show continues through March 11, 2017
PRESS RELEASE
DC Moore Gallery is pleased to present Robert Kushner: Portraits & Perennials. In this exhibition of new paintings and works on paper, Kushner extends the boundaries of his compositions, infusing his iconic, organic imagery with vibrant color and increased geometric precision in a lyrical synthesis of styles and techniques.
Underscoring the evocative title of the catalogue’s essay, “Do REAL Men Paint Flowers?,” the exhibition seeks to disrupt the narrative surrounding the decorative while exploring the importance of beauty in contemporary art. In paintings such as Bossa Nova (2015), Ahavah (2016), and Nasturtiums–Hot Season (2016), Kushner’s defining grid-like backgrounds have grown increasingly pronounced, as he employs a bold, energized palette of brilliant pinks, purples, and yellows that imbue this body of work with new vigor. “…I began to consider how I could introduce a more raucous color sense, and increase of scale of the individual floral and foliate elements so that they might go spilling off the confines of the canvas,” the artist explains.
These tensions between the figurative and the abstract, achieved through interplays of organic movement and geometric configurations, are in full evidence in works such as Spring Rain (2016) and the artist’s monumental Tenderness (2015). At times the work’s imagery, created with oil and acrylic paint with gold leaf, evokes Matisse’s botanical cutouts, while their bright, vertical bands of color uncannily call to mind the works of Barnett Newman and Ellsworth Kelly. Reflecting on these fluid interchanges, Kushner wittily muses in the exhibition’s catalogue: “So, are geometry and botany at peace? In dialogue? At each other’s throats? I would like to think that when I am done after working on it for weeks and sometimes months, there is an interesting and intentionally confusing juxtaposition between pure abstraction and linear form—that they each balance one another and create their own tightrope act.”
The accompanying catalogue to the exhibition highlights these new developments through a series of thought-provoking questions posed to the artist by notable individuals in fields ranging from the art historical and creative to the spiritual and culinary realms. These included curators and art critics, two museum directors, a poet, a rabbi, a restaurateur, and a diplomat. Their inquiries covered a wide spectrum of Kushner’s artistic concerns and brought new critical insights into the artist’s ongoing body of work.
Robert Kushner has exhibited extensively in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum, in New York, and the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art. His work is featured in public collections such as The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Tate Modern, London, England; and the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy. Publications on Kushner’s work include the monograph Gardens of Earthly Delight (Hudson Hills Press, 1997) with essays by Alexandra Anderson and Holland Cotter, and Wild Gardens by Michael Duncan (Pomegranate, 2006). In 2012, Kushner was the editor of an important volume of art criticism by Amy Goldin (1926-1978) titled Amy Goldin: Art in a Hairshirt (Hudson Hills).