Robin Rhode

January 2020

The Arts Club and Wedel Art are pleased to present an exhibition of work by performance and visual artist Robin Rhode. Rhode utilises whimsical imagery and playful narratives to counter darker influences from his early life in post-apartheid South Africa.

Often staging performances in the streets of Johannesburg, Rhode creates sequential photographs, or stop-motion works, that display and explore the act of drawing. By creating performed narratives, like drawing a bike on a wall and mimicking riding it, he borrows from the genres of cartoon, slapstick comedy and absurdism to engage with topics such as urban culture, socio-economic inequality and outgrowths of Postcolonialism.

The artist came of age in newly post-apartheid South Africa, when youth culture was under the growing influence of hip-hop, film, and sports. These influences, alongside the community’s reliance on storytelling in the form of colourful murals and graffiti, encouraged the development of his hybrid street-based aesthetic. The Arts Club will exhibit two of his sequential photographic works, Frustum (2017) and Delta (2018)

Rhode (b. 1976, Cape Town, South Africa) has had solo exhibitions at SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah; National Gallery Victoria, Melbourne; Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg and Lehmann Maupin, New York. He has also been included in numerous group exhibitions including Prix Pictet 2019 at the Victoria and Albert Museum Porter Gallery, London; NOW at National Galleries, Edinburgh, Art/Afrique, le nouvel atelier, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; What remains is tomorrow, South African Pavilion, Venice Biennale and Staging Action: Performance in Photography since 1960, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Rhode’s work is included in numerous public collections, including LACMA, Los Angeles; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Studio Museum in Harlem and Centre Pompidou, Paris.

The exhibition is curated by Amelie von Wedel and Pernilla Holmes of Wedel Art. Robin Rhode is represented by Lehmann Maupin New York, Hong Kong and Seoul.