ART CITIES:N.York-Robin Rhode
Robin Rhode has established his unique practice with a multifold approach, working across media, including drawing, performance, photography, video, and music. He uses a range of materials including chalk, charcoal, and soap, as well as the human body, the artist’s own body and the bodies of others. Rhode was raised in Johannesburg, where his artistic approach was consolidated during the post-Apartheid period.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Lehmann Maupin Gallery Archive
Local street murals, as well as the paintings created by Robin Rhode and his friends on the walls of their school, continue to serve as sources of inspiration for his work. Another school-related experience that has left an imprint on his work was the initiation rituals during which older students forced the newcomers to treat these paintings as if they were real, for instance pretending that they were riding a painted bicycle. The absurdity of these childhood rituals, with their abusive overtone, has been assimilated into Rhode’s work, evolving into an intriguing combination of drawing and physical actions. A new series of works by Robin Rhode are presented in his solo exhibition “The Geometry of Colour” at Lehmann Maupin Gallery in New York. This series culminates Rhode’s work engaging the public through cooperative visual and performance art, documented through c-print photographs, at a wall in Johannesburg where he and his team have worked since 2011. In “The Geometry of Colour”, the artist utilizes geometric articulation of space, together with color theory to visualize the complexities of human nature and the political and economic systems established in its image. Coming of age among the first generation of post-apartheid South Africans, Rhode has long made it his mission to engage with the realities of poverty, crime, and violence that plague many developing and postcolonial societies. “Under the Sun” (2017) was inspired by his trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories last year while he was preparing for solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Struck by the similarity of today’s treatment of Palestinians to the divisive history of South Africa, Rhode was inspired to produce images of the sun’s rays as metaphor for both the political and atmospheric climates that the regions share. Rhode treats the squares of color representing gradients of sunlight as stained glass or a mosaic across 36 photographs. A doppelgänger of the artist alternates between basking in and shielding himself from the light depicted in the shifting spectrum. Like their creator’s dynamic engagement with different sources of inspiration, the works themselves embody a series of contrasts: they are figurative and narrative, yet can simultaneously be read in relation to formal values such as line, color, composition and perspective; they exist on the spectrum between high and low, transience and permanence, bodily and cerebral elements, an ascetic black and-white palette and vibrant color.
Info: Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 536 West 22nd Street, New York, Duration: 18/1-24/2/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.lehmannmaupin.com
