New Feature Exhibition in March February 09 2023

CHRIS ROBB
The Limits of Control

March 4 - 25, 2023
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 4, 4-7 PM
Artist Talk: Friday, March 10, 11 AM

About the Exhibition:

Chris Robb is known for his contemporary, mixed-media paintings that examine ideas of culture, identity, memory, and family. For this, Chris Robb’s third solo exhibition at Arts on Douglas, he presents The Limits of Control, a collection of large-scale paintings that explore subtle boundaries between control and chaos. Orderly grids and patterns occupy the same spaces as gestural scribbles, energized mark making, bold patterns, and elusive representational forms set against striking color combinations. Robb incorporates a wide range of materials in each piece, including oils, acrylics, monoprints, image transfers, stencils, and collage.

In a recent essay, Orlando-based independent curator Ginger Gregg Duggan elaborates that Robb’s approach to artmaking is, “at once disciplined and automatic, linear and circular, restrained and organic, figurative and abstract. His work is its own universe created out of chaos but organized in a very deliberate way according to a disciplined color palette, a controlled set of materials, parameters, and thematic structures that must be ‘completed’ before moving on. Incredibly, despite all of these rules and levels of control, Chris likes to think of his paintings as organic, having simply ‘grown’.”

Informed by eastern thinking and a strong belief in a simple straightforward intuitive gesture, this work is intensely personal and immediate, while leaving room for viewers to bring their own associations and interpretations.

About the Artist

Born in Berea, Ohio to an art teacher mother and Scottish immigrant father, Chris Robb has lived in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and now works and resides in Winter Park, Florida. Chris graduated from the University of Central Florida in the spring of 1980 and immediately moved to the vibrant 80s art scene of the Lower East Side of New York. The first shows he participated in were group shows at the iconic Club 57 that also included work from Keith Haring, who curated the shows, Jean Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf, and many others. While in New York, Chris also secured a grant from the Committee for the Visual Arts and had his first gallery show at PS 122. Since then, Robb has participated in group and one man shows throughout his career and. His paintings and works on paper are held in private and public collections throughout the US and France. Chris is also a well-known Creative Director and Art Director, and he has films in the permanent archive at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and won Gold Lions at Cannes.