Bortolami presents Robert Bordo: Now Still Then
EXHIBITION
10.15.2022—11.20.2022
photo courtesy Bortolami
On view October 15th - November 20th, 2022. Public hours Saturday and Sunday, 11am-5pm.
Robert Bordo’s solo exhibition at Foreland, now still then, presents two bodies of work; a series of new paintings entitled Les Lucioles (French for fireflies) alongside a survey of postcard paintings (2000-2022). Bordo has lived and worked in upstate New York since the early 2000s, where the bucolic environs, artistic community, and weekly commute from the city has provided fodder for his painting.
Les Lucioles revisit a motif from Bordo’s earlier works Les Mouches and Denim paintings from 1989-91. As a young painter, he was drawn to conceptual and land artists like Robert Smithson and Richard Long, whose work was landscape-driven, ambulatory and often ephemeral. The early paintings are blue, monochromatic canvases embedded with Timberland boot prints and emerged when the lives of many, and especially gay, communities, were dominated by AIDS. Darkly humorous, quirky, and meandering, the early and recent paintings refer to the body and the landscape it traverses. The monochrome appears as a Modernist trope, but is queered in Bordo’s allusions to cruising and tight denim jeans.
The postcard paintings began in 2000, when Bordo happened upon a box of postcards in his mother’s home after her death. He began pinning the images to his studio wall, utilizing the arrangements as a source of composition as well as a site for metaphor. The postcards in his paintings depict actual landscapes as well as imaginary ones, evoking a nostalgia for far-flung places of the past and future. Critic and curator Peter Eeley has described the postcard paintings as remaking pictures in paint and “an appropriate model for the ways in which we archive and recall images.” Earlier examples such as Second Sight and Some Lost Daysemphasize a luminous background, while the most recent Yarn is a dense lush puzzle of images, composed in a time when the landscapes depicted were out of reach.
Robert Bordo (b.1949, Montreal) has lived in New York since 1972. He was an Associate Professor of Art at The Cooper Union, New York, where he led the painting program from 1996 until 2017. Recent solo and two person exhibitions include The National Exemplar, New York, NY; Bortolami, New York, NY; The Suburban, Oak Park, IL; Alexander and Bonin Gallery, New York, NY. His paintings have been featured in exhibitions at The Kitchen; MoMA PS1; the Brooklyn Museum; the Sheldon Museum of Art, Omaha; the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel; Artists Space, New York; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and the Drawing Center. His work is held in the collections of SFMoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, and the Blanton Museum of Art among others. Bordo has been the recipient of many prestigious awards, fellowships, and residencies including PRAKSIS Oslo, the Robert de Niro Sr. Painting Prize, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Canada Council Arts Grants, the Tesuque Foundation Arts Fellowship Award, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and a Painting Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.