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.
I ❤ MATISSE, ROBERT KUSHNER AT DC MOORE GALLERY, 5.6-6.19 2021 /
Please join me at DC Moore Gallery
I ❤ MATISSE
May 6 - June 19, 2021
Click here to enter viewing room
Open House with Robert Kushner at DC Moore Gallery:
Thursday, May 6 from 4-6pm
Saturday, May 8 from 3-5pm
Saturday, May 15 from 3-5pm
Please make an appointment by clicking here.
Artist Talk: Jenelle Porter in Conversation with Robert Kushner
May 13 @ 5pm EDT via Zoom
For more information and to register
DC MOORE GALLERY
535 W 22nd Street, New York NY 10011
Catalogue available with an essay by Peter Eleey entitled “The Matisse Line”
Robert Kushner, Tray of Oranges and Taisho Kimono, 2021, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 inches
Robert Kushner, Galerie Nathalie Obadia, FIAC Paris /
Robert Kushner, Seven Seraphim, 2020, Oil, acrylic and gold leaf on canvas 182,9 x 182,9 cm (72 x 72 in.)
I am very pleased to be joining these artists and the Galerie Nathalie Obadia in the online viewing rooms at the FIAC this year!
MARTIN BARRÉ
VALÉRIE BELIN
CAROLE BENZAKEN
ROSSON CROW
FABRICE HYBER
ROBERT KUSHNER
BENOÎT MAIRE
LAURE PROUVOST
FIONA RAE
BRENNA YOUNGBLOOD
Download the preview here.
Access the Online Viewing Room here.
VIP PREVIEW: MARCH 2 & 3 | PUBLIC DAYS: MARCH 4 - 7, 2021
"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.
From the Studio: Robert Kushner /
A special thanks to DC Moore Gallery for this fun interview last week. Conjuring inspiration from Matisse for my modern-day visions has been a colorful and comforting window into Spring from within my studio.
Work is going well in the studio. I am working each day. Not thinking so much about relevance to the exterior world. Rather, I am following a well developed mental fantasy. I work thinking more about being an artist in the 1930s. I am a Danish (or maybe Finnish, or maybe Swedish) artist who studied at Matisse's academy in Paris (1907-1911) during the heyday of the Parisian avant garde and of Fauvism itself. But right after that, I had to go back home to run the family business. But from then till now, over a century, in the dark attic of that old, sturdy family house, I have a studio in the attic. Only one small window.
Robert Kushner painting Matisse Table, 2020. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 inches.
Red Room, 2020. Oil and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 inches
One Red Anemone, 2020. Oil, acrylic, and gold leaf on canvas, 72 x 36 inches
During the dark, cold gray winters, instead of going in the Vilhelm Hammershøi direction of silvery light and cool gray tonality, I summon in my mind the blinding light of the South of France. I remember being a student of the Master, watching him daily in awe, as I am now squeezing the entire world of color onto my palette and then letting it sing on the canvas. In my attic studio, I am carefree, wild, experimental, intoxicated by color harmonies and the sun-drenched tranquility and protection of being in the South of France. Or is it the South of California? The Mediterranean plants, the fruit, the vases, the fabrics... and that is what keeps going on in my head.
Robert Kushner with Seven Seraphim, 2019. Oil, acrylic, and gold leaf on canvas, 72 x 72 inches.
Robert Kushner's dog Foxy with Five Red Anemones, 2020. Oil, acrylic, and palladium leaf on canvas, 72 x 72 inches.
You may contact DC Moore Gallery about any of these artworks. Also, check out more portfolios of my artwork on the DC Moore Gallery website.
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 at Yoshiaki Inoue Gallery /
Please stop in to Yoshiaki Inoue Gallery in Osaka, Japan to see ‘Robert Kushner - New Paintings’ on view now through December 25th.
For more information, please click here.
With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985 /
Robert Kushner, “Fairies,” 1980, acrylic on cotton (Chris Kendall)
THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, LOS ANGELES
ON VIEW: OCTOBER 27, 2019 - MAY 11, 2020
With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 is the first full-scale scholarly survey of this groundbreaking American art movement, encompassing works in painting, sculpture, collage, ceramics, installation art, and performance documentation. Covering the years 1972 to 1985 and featuring approximately fifty artists from across the United States, the exhibition examines the Pattern and Decoration movement’s defiant embrace of forms traditionally coded as feminine, domestic, ornamental, or craft-based and thought to be categorically inferior to fine art. Pattern and Decoration artists gleaned motifs, color schemes, and materials from the decorative arts, freely appropriating floral, arabesque, and patchwork patterns and arranging them in intricate, almost dizzying, and sometimes purposefully gaudy designs. Their work across mediums pointedly evokes a pluralistic array of sources from Islamic architectural ornamentation to American quilts, wallpaper, Persian carpets, and domestic embroidery.
Pattern and Decoration artists practiced a postmodernist art of appropriation borne of love for its sources rather than the cynical detachment that became de rigueur in the international art world of the 1980s. This exhibition traces the movement’s broad reach in postwar American art by including artists widely regarded as comprising the core of the movement, such as Valerie Jaudon, Joyce Kozloff, Robert Kushner, Kim MacConnel, and Miriam Schapiro; artists whose contributions to Pattern and Decoration have been underrecognized, such as Merion Estes, Dee Shapiro, Kendall Shaw, and Takako Yamaguchi; as well as artists who are not normally considered in the context of Pattern and Decoration, such as Emma Amos, Billy Al Bengston, Al Loving, and Betty Woodman. Though little studied today, the Pattern and Decoration movement was institutionally recognized, critically received, and commercially successful from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. The overwhelming preponderance of craft-based practices and unabashedly decorative sensibilities in art of the present-day point to an influential P&D legacy that is ripe for consideration.
With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 is organized by Anna Katz, Curator, with Rebecca Lowery, Assistant Curator, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
To learn more about this exhibition, please click here.
Read the Reviews:
“More is more. Why the ‘Pattern and Decoration’ show at MOCA is pure pleasure”, Christopher Knight, LA Times, November 4, 2019