PURCHASE: Robin Rhode

Robin Rhode, Arm Chair (still), 2011, digital animation, 1:20. Image via neuberger.org, courtesy of the artist, Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong; and White Cube. 

Animating the Everyday

May 4 – August 10, 2014

NEUBERGER MUSEUM OF ART

Purchase College, State University of New York

735 Anderson Hill Road

Purchase, NY

From Neuberger.org:

South African artist Robin Rhode has been awarded the 2014 Roy R. Neuberger Exhibition Prize, a biannual prize, which celebrates an exceptional artist with an early-career survey and catalogue. Rhode’s exhibition, Animating the Everyday, a ten-year survey of his digital videos, features 22 works that Rhode identifies as “animations” and photographic series that correspond to or complement the time-based work.

Rhode’s exuberant animations—created in the streets, studios, his parents’ yard in Johannesburg, and Berlin, where he now lives and works—transform the quotidian into the playful and fantastic but include an underpinning of melancholy, danger, and risk. “I embrace chaos. I don’t create a work only with the idea that it has to be lighthearted; there’s something dark underneath,” Rhode explained at a recent visit to the Neuberger Museum of Art. “I come from a culture that is very spontaneous, that has a lot of humor and sarcasm. It stems from the South African mentality and has to do with freedom, and with the possibility of imagining or reinventing another world quite rapidly... approachability and accessibility are fundamental to my work.”

A fully-illustrated catalogue with essays by co-curators Helaine Posner, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Neuberger Museum of Art, and Louise Yelin, Professor of Literature, Purchase College; Tom Gunning, Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Art History, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, and the College at the University of Chicago; and Leora Maltz-Leca, Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture at the Rhode Island School of Design accompanies the exhibition.

Exhibit Link