Robin Rhode

In 2017 FNB JoburgArtFair was delighted to announce Robin Rhode as the 2017 Featured Artist.

In 2015 Robin Rhode was the Artistic Director of the first-ever live production of an opera in Times Square: Arnold Schönberg's Erwartung – A Performance by Robin Rhode; conducted by Arturo Tamayo, and produced in partnership with Performa. The soprano Carole Sidney Louis performed solo on a minimal stage created from printed sketches by Rhode, amidst the sky high buildings and billboards standing in for the dense forest illuminated only by moonlight that the opera is set in.

In 2014 Irish rock band U2 invited Rhode to direct a music video for their single, "Every Breaking Wave". The music video includes some of Rhode's signature stop frame animation stencil drawings with figures interacting with these drawings.

Reminiscent of practices of street art, Rhode usually works in public spaces, using walls, public basketball courts or just the street as his "canvas." His preferred materials are easily accessible ones like charcoal and paint. As a result, his works stand out through their simplicity and their formal clarity, emphasizing the idea over lavishness of production. Rhode transforms simple shapes into elements of narratives, interacting with only imagined presences. This narrative practice goes back to an initiation ritual at South African high schools – that Rhode himself experienced – where new students are forced to draw and interact with their drawing. Rhode's reference to this event takes this social gesture further into a playful mode of addressing cultural phenomena. Rhode also pays homage to the fervent utopian ideals of the Bauhaus, implicating Oskar Schlemmer's seminal Triadic Ballet from the twenties, a performance experiment created in the Bauhaus studios in the absence of a theatre space, balancing "emotional impulses" with an agenda of political agitation. His drawings of objects like a bicycle, a motorbike, a car, or of abstract shapes and patterns are employed as physical elements in a story, often alluding to the act of creation itself.

In November 2009 Rhode collaborated with Norwegian concert pianist, Leif Ove Andsnes in a reimagining of Modest Mussorgsky's, Pictures at an Exhibition. This collaboration titled, Pictures Reframed features Rhode's stop-frame video animations. Rhode was responsible for the stage design and all visual accompaniments for Andsnes' contemporary exploration of Modest Mussorgsky's piano suite which premiered at the Lincoln Center, New York City.

In 2005, Rhode was featured in the 51st Venice Biennale and New Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2007 he had a large-scale exhibition at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, curated by Stephanie Rosenthal accompanied by his first monograph, "Walk Off", published by Hatje Cantz. In September 2008 he had solo shows at both the Hayward Gallery and White Cube Gallery, London and participated in Prospect.1 New Orleans, the New Orleans Biennale curated by Dan Cameron. In 2009, Rhode presented a solo exhibition titled, "Catch Air" at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio. In 2010 Rhode had a solo exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) featuring performances, wall drawings, photographic series, objects, video animations and film. The Castello di Rivoli invited Rhode to exhibit in 2011, resulting in "Paries Pictus" – Rhode's interactive and performative educational project. 'Paries Pictus' is the Latin word for wall drawing. This project invited children to use oversized crayons and to colour-in large scale geometric vinyl graphics applied directly to the walls by the artist. Rhode saw this project as a way of nurturing growth and creativity in youths through visual arts and contemporary art. 2013 saw Rhode's first solo exhibition in Australia, "The Call of Walls" at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. This exhibition consisted of two gallery spaces- the first space displaying Rhode's unique blend of fine art, street culture and performance through his photography and animation. The other space incorporating "Paries Pictus", previously staged in Turin, Italy; New York and Cape Town, South Africa In 2014 Rhode presented a new exhibition titled, "Animating the Everyday" at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York. This show was a 10-year survey into Rhode's digital videos. 22 works were shown focussing on the digital videos that Rhode classifies as "animations". It also included photographic series that complemented these time-based works. The Kulturhuset Stadsteatern [sv] in Stockholm, Sweden, invited Rhode to exhibit in 2015. This culminated in The Sudden Walk and included a performance with one of Rhode's long-term collaborators, the dancer, Jean-Baptiste André, who performed the piece, Light Giver Light Taker at the opening. “Under the Sun”, Rhode’s first Israeli museum exhibition, opened at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2017.

Rhode's earlier practice was dominated by performances which took place first on the streets, later in museums and galleries. One of the most popular performances is, "Car Theft" (2003, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN) where Rhode appears as a hooded character in street clothes who first draws a car on the wall and then tries to break in, eventually throwing a stone at the drawn object; highlighting his signature method of attempting to playfully transform flat renderings of everyday objects into illusory three-dimensional ones through his physical interactions. Very much a provocateur and cultural subversive, he shares conceptual links with artists as varied as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Hammons and the Russian constructivists. Rhode is realising his own personal vision of the world that surrounds him, using art as a means to approach and reflect it in an interdisciplinary practice that goes beyond established borders of genres and traditional ways to engage with art. In Skipping Rope (2005, Musée ďArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC) Rhode interacted with the audience, engaging them into playing with an imaginary rope. The spectators became participants, taking part in Rhode's imagination that continuously seeks to reach beyond the boundaries of traditional artist-spectator roles.

Robin Rhode (born 1976 in Cape Town) is a South African artist based in Berlin, Germany. He studied Fine Art at Technikon Witwatersrand, now known as the University of Johannesburg, in Johannesburg, South Africa, followed by a postgraduate program at the South African School of Motion Picture Medium and Live Performance (AFDA).