ArtistKushner, Robert

Artist Years1949-living

Artist NationalityAmerican

TitleConch XIV

Year1987

MediumPrint > Monoprint

DimensionsSheet: 24.5 X 19 inches

Accession NumberRC2197

NotesRobert Kushner is an American contemporary painter who is known especially for his involvement in Pattern and Decoration. He has been called "a founder" of that artistic movement. In addition to painting, Kushner creates installations in a variety of mediums, from large-scale public mosaics to delicate paintings on antique book pages.

Kushner draws from a unique range of influences, including Islamic and European textiles, Henri Matisse, Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Demuth, Pierre Bonnard, Tawaraya Sotatsu, Ito Jakuchu, Qi Baishi, and Wu Changshuo. Kushner's work combines organic representational elements with abstracted geometric forms as a background in a way that is both decorative and modernist. He has said, “I never get tired of pursuing new ideas in the realm of ornamentation. Decoration, an abjectly pejorative dismissal for many, is a very big, somewhat defiant declaration for me. … The eye can wander, the mind think unencumbered through visual realms that are expansively and emotionally rich. Decoration has always had its own agenda, the sincere and unabashed offering of pleasure and solace.

Kushner's 2010 installation, Scriptorium: Devout Exercises of the Heart, is a group of over one thousand drawings of flowers and plants on book pages that date from 1500 to 1920. The pages have been removed from discarded and damaged books of all types from around the globe. Scriptorium was exhibited in Desire at The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. It then traveled to the Kunsthallen Brandts in Odense, Denmark before returning to the U.S. for the inaugural Chelsea exhibition at DC Moore Gallery in 2011. It was exhibited at the La Jolla Athenaeum in California in summer 2012.

Kushner has created large-scale murals for public and private spaces. In 2004, he installed two monumental mosaic murals, 4 Seasons Seasoned, at the 77th Street and Lexington Avenue subway station. He has also completed commissions at Gramercy Tavern and Maialino restaurants in New York City, Union Square in Tokyo, The Ritz Carlton Highlands in Lake Tahoe, CA, and Federal Reserve System in Washington, DC. In 2010, an eighty-foot-long marble mosaic, Welcome, was installed at the new Raleigh Durham International Airport in North Carolina.

Two 2021 glass mosaics of his are displayed in Kalauao metro station on Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi.
(source: wikipedia.org)