Faces: People and Pandas
On September 19, 2012 Faces: People and Pandas opens at Massimo De Carlo gallery, Rob Pruitt’s first
solo show in Milan.
Extravagant flea markets, a 40 foot line of cocaine, glittering panda paintings, totemic stacked tire
sculptures recycled into candy dishes, and frozen blue jean and cement sculptures have made Pruitt
one of the New York art scene’s most notorius artists, starting back in the late 90s.
Pruitt’s language is simple, direct, minimalist, and above all, welcoming. The artist re-interprets
materials, objects, and everyday tools with a keen sense of humour and sardonic irony.
The American artist realizes for this show new face paintings – quickly drawn faces on large canvases
painted with spectural gradients. Side by side in the first room of the gallery, they receive the visitor
showing cheekily deep colors and every kind of expression. Despite its abstraction and essentiality, each
painting portrays an identity, maybe a familiar face or a childhood memory.
I love minimalism, and I also love melodrama. So with my face paintings, I combined the two. First I make a
shifting color, gradient backdrop - color is one of the best ways to express emotion - and then I draw a face.
Sometimes the lines of the face are steady and bold, sometimes they skip and falter. I just go with my emotions,
which are always changing. What results, whether the simple lines of a smiling face over a pastel blush, or a
sorrowful cry dashed over a range of fiery reds, really paints a story, not just a picture.
A new series of sculptures accompany Pruitt’s paintings in the first room. Paper shopping bags,
collected by the artist in the United States, are presented inverted, bottom side up to reveal the usual
custom of stamping the factory workers’s name on the bottom of the bag. Perhaps has as an expression
of pride of workmanship or perhaps as an identity tag to trace responsability for an acident caused by a
poorly made bag. Emptied of their utilitarian function and slipped on to blocks of marble cut to the
same size of the bag, become a metaphoric tombstone of their past contents.
The famous glittering pandas end the exhibition. Pruitt represents this lone and delicate animal who
needs our protection, like a mosaic or a scrapbook, in which every tile is a previous work from his panda
series, as if it is a glittering celebration of a grand finale.
Artist
罗布·普鲁伊特1964年生于华盛顿,曾就读于华盛顿的科科伦艺术与设计学院和纽约帕森斯设计学院,目前生活工作在纽约。
自二十世纪九十年代初起,罗布·普鲁伊特就对美国流行文化采取了多种独特的探索形式。无论是著名的《COCAINE BUFFET》(1998年),还是闪光的肖像《熊猫》系列,或是《自杀绘画》系列,普鲁伊特的作品是对流行世界的一种超现实奢华诠释,也是一个多方面探索当今时代文化的万花筒。
罗布·普鲁伊特通过对常见物品及材料的重新诠释,赋予其幽默和讽刺感,表达了对文化与社会相关想法的细微变化。“面具”系列中,艺术家不断描绘个性与情感的复杂性。面部形态割破了画布,将破坏性与创造力并存,并融合色彩渐变和图案堆积,创造出新的形象。