A201105124551 001

Masks

Rob Pruitt

Massimo De Carlo presents Masks, Rob Pruitt’s 9th exhibition with the gallery and first solo show at the Palazzo Belgioioso space in Milan. Pruitt’s exhibition centres on a new painting series of faces, initially conceived as props for a dance performance that never was. The body of work began with the smaller canvases which are scaled to the human face and were to be held by the dancers as masks. Reimagining a project that began a decade ago of quick gestures over gradient fields, Pruitt continues his pursuit of depicting the complexities of personality and emotion through these simple means. With these new paintings, the facial gestures 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.

日期
01.12.2020 | 23.01.2021
画廊
文件
PRESS RELEASE
OTHER

Massimo De Carlo presents Masks, Rob Pruitt’s 9th exhibition with the gallery and first solo show at the Palazzo Belgioioso space in Milan. Pruitt’s exhibition centres on a new painting series of faces, initially conceived as props for a dance performance that never was. The body of work began with the smaller canvases which are scaled to the human face and were to be held by the dancers as masks. Reimagining a project that began a decade ago of quick gestures over gradient fields, Pruitt continues his pursuit of depicting the complexities of personality and emotion through these simple means. With these new paintings, the facial gestures 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. Throughout his career Rob Pruitt has fine-tuned his ability to express nuanced ideas about culture and society through re-interpretation of common objects and materials, all filtered through a sense of humor and irony. We can see this recognition of practice with the titling of his Aspen Art Museum retrospective in 2013, Rob Pruitt: an American Folk Artist. Pruitt sees his practice existing towards the edges of the art world, being drawn more to outsider techniques and commonplace media choices than most of his contemporaries. With his new mask paintings, Pruitt’s aesthetic influences are similarly positioned along the periphery, including carved jack-o-lanterns, Mummenschanz, a Swiss theatre troupe, the collage paintings of Enrico Baj, and Saul Steinberg's paper bag masks as documented in Le Masquerade by Inge Morath.

The ideas Saul Steinberg discusses regarding his Mask Series are similar to the way Pruitt views the impetus for his new paintings; adding to the discourse about the intentions of disguise and the accepted ways one can metaphorically wear a mask or invent new personas for themselves through costume, makeup, hairstyles, and other facades. Steinberg himself says ‘The mask is a protection against revelation.’ The idea of masks being used as protection has made an explicit entrance into all of our lives this past year. As we fear to go outdoors or in public settings because of Coronavirus, it's only when we have a mask on that we feel safe. When we're finally able to show our unguarded faces to each other again, will they be the same as we remembered?

A new group of reclaimed furniture costumed and covered with a multitude of colored tapes dominates the gallery’s floor. The exhibition was designed by Christoph Radl, transforming the gallery into a vibrant, anti-functional cinema, replacing those forced to close due to Coronovirus restrictions. This installation design simultaneously makes Pruitt’s empty chair sculptures the captive audience for his mask paintings and reminds the viewer of the strange and isolating times in which they were created.

Rob Pruitt

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。

Rob Pruitt Portrait fz Mye F

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