Press Release
Retrospective is pleased to present Robert Davis’s
“Our Houses Dream in Blueprints” --in four parts: 1. The Den 2. Welfare Moms 3. Anna McNeill Whistler 4. The Cuckold
April 19th - May 18th Opening Reception: Saturday, April 19th, 5-7PM 438 Carroll St., Hudson, NY
Robert Davis will exhibit new paintings along with site-specific furniture installations at the gallery’s row house location. Within each chromatically unified room, color and existing architecture provide starting points for Davis’ installation of ‘Blueprints.’ Davis usurps familiar forms of abstract painting and often cites conventions that lay outside the fine arts to give his work new, simplified purpose. Davis’ textural paintings allow for vacillations between micro and macro viewpoints. Like a lyricist pushing the structure of a traditional rhyme to absurdity, the artist uses stylistic tropes to his own end, disrupting their meanings and giving urgency to structure itself.
The works incorporate base and addictive substances (wine, cigarette ash, coffee) to gesture toward a “real” feeling of the world and our inadequacy at understanding environments through the senses. However, rather than reiterating well-worn discourse on the limits of representation, the paintings and installations present the object world as inexhaustible. Davis’s use of abstraction simultaneously provides a space of estrangement and breathing room -a wedge between known worlds- creating possibilities for a range of forms and experiences. Davis’s titles play a crucial role, not just in pointing out the complexity of naming a thing, but also as indicators of his serious and sentimental intentions.
This exhibition, to be held in a row house located at 438 Carroll Street, is one in series of shows that Retrospective is planning for spaces throughout Hudson in addition to its storefront at 727 Warren St. It will run concurrently with a show of new works by Brian Belott and Joe Bradley at the Warren St. location.
438 Carroll Street will be open Saturdays, 12-5pm, and by appointment.