Craig F. Starr Associates is pleased to announce an upcoming show of new works by Rob Wynne, titled Rob Wynne: The Heartbeat of a Bird. The show opens September 8th and features recent sculptures set against a backdrop of the artist’s hand-printed wallpaper. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York since 2000.
The gallery space is transformed into a surrealist environment populated by the diverse elements of Wynne’s rich artistic vocabulary. Hand-printed wallpaper irregularly patterned with the artist’s left and right eyes covers two of the gallery’s walls. The wallpaper, in turn, is punctuated with glass tears. This poignant combination of eyes and tears calls to mind Man Ray’s famous 1932 photograph Les Larmes, however the disjunctive arrangement of the eyes and the oversized, magnifying-glass substantiality of the tears prohibit a strictly literal interpretation.
Occupying the gallery’s east wall is one of Wynne’s poured glass word pieces from which the show derives its title: The Heartbeat of a Bird. This tender evocation of corporeal and emotional vulnerability, coupled with the material fragility of the poured glass, is at the heart of Wynne’s artistic practice.
Physically and conceptually uniting the exhibition are Wynne’s free-standing mushroom sculptures of mirrored glass. In groupings ranging from one to fourteen mushrooms per poured-glass base, the baroque effusiveness of the installation is tempered by the grisaille monochrome of the mirrored surfaces. Within these mirrored surfaces, the eyes of the nearby wallpaper become reflected, distorted, and multiplied, as does the viewer’s own reflection. The result is an environment that is at once playful and disorienting, seductive and subversive.
Rob Wynne’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions since 1979 and is included in prominent private and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. His work is well-known in Europe, with recent exhibitions in Paris, Munich, and Geneva.