NYAB Event - Russell Roberts "Pockets of Accumulation"

Russell Roberts "Pockets of Accumulation"

Heskin Contemporary

This event has ended.

This exhibition will be a new series of oil paintings and a selection of works on paper. The following is an excerpt from the catalogue adjoining the exhibition written by the artist and writer Jennifer Riley.

Russell Roberts is an accomplished mature abstract artist working in the medium of paint for some time. In his new abstract paintings multiple gestalts and provocative explorations of painting history combine into images that resist easy categorization. Roberts embraces the flexibility and fluidity of the medium of painting for both its literal and metaphorical possibilities.

In a time of widening spectacle, gloss and speed, roberts exploits the slowness of the mediums liquidity and transparency, its opacity and density. Some works feature line others celebrate form, many juggle or balance both. Using fragments, layers, lines, drips, washes and erasures these works depict a stratified and changing world in which multiple formal differences and often opposing elements conjoin to form new and integrated identities. In his complex structures, he collides organic irregularity with geometric and biomorphic shapes, and articulates stretches of canvas with an expansive range of unpredictable and constantly surprising color.

Mr. Roberts grew up in New York city, graduated from Vassar College, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and received an MFA from Boston University in 1995. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Painting in 1997, a grant from the Mass Arts Council in 2002 and an Albee Foundation Fellowship in 2006 and 2008, among others. He was the Artist-in-Residence at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in 2003. He has had one- person exhibitions at Binghamton University, UNC Chapel Hill, Farrell- Pollock Gallery, Boston University and a two- person show at the Painting Center, NY. This is Roberts’ first exhibition at Heskin Contemporary.