Moon Cycles
MASSIMODECARLO Pièce Unique is pleased to present Moon Cycles by American artist Rob Pruitt.
Following his exhibition Holiday at MASSIMODECARLO Milan (2024), Moon Cycles unfolds like a meditation on life’s rhythms - both the grand cosmic cycles and the deeply personal ones.
Spanning themes of time, memory, identity, and the peculiar poetry of everyday objects, the works are as introspective as they are universal.
Over the course of two weeks, a suite of 3 paintings marks the passage of time, capturing the subtle drama of moon cycles as they shift throughout the night sky. Drawing from photos taken on his iPhone and employing meticulous colour blending, Pruitt channels the sequential motion of British photographer Eadweard Muybridge, but replaces the iconic galloping horses with the quieter vision of the moon, in various stages of its cycles.
The result is both meditative and cinematic - a visual reel of shifting hues that encourages viewers to pause and reflect on how our days, the fundamental units of our existence, often slip into the background of our lives.
Propped atop the canvas, a wooden block painted green subtly expands the scope of the image, letting the palm tree out beyond the frame.
As Pruitt describes it, these works are “containers,” open to whatever we choose to project onto them, transforming the ordinary into an ever-evolving canvas of meaning.
The Artist
Rob Pruitt was born in Washington D.C. in 1964 and studied at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington D.C. and Parsons School of Design in New York. He lives and works in New York.
Since the early 1990s, Rob Pruitt’s risk-taking investigations into American popular culture have taken many forms. From his notorious Cocaine Buffet (1998) and glitter portraits of Pandas or the significant Suicide Paintings series, Pruitt’s works are a surreal and extravagant interpretation of the pop world, a kaleidoscopic look towards mass culture by exploring the multiples aspects and the paradoxes of our present time.
Throughout his career, Rob Pruitt has fine-tuned his ability to express nuanced ideas about culture and society through the re-interpretation of common objects and materials, all filtered through a sense of humour and irony. With his Mask series, the artist continues his pursuit of depicting the complexities of personality and emotions. The facial gestures indeed are cut into the canvas with a razor - destructive and creative at the same time, these gestures are married to an accumulation of gradients, patterns, and prints to create a character