Robert Kushner(/ˈkʊʃnər/; born 1949, Pasadena, CA) is an American contemporary painter who is known especially for his involvement in Pattern and Decoration.[1][2] He has been called "a founder" of that artistic movement.[3] 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."[citation needed]
Spring Scatter Summation (Detail), 2005 By Robert Kushner, Oil acrylic, gold leaf, and glitter on canvas 84 x 552 inches
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.[4] It then traveled to the Kunsthallen Brandts in Odense, Denmark[5] 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.[6] He has also completed commissions at Gramercy Tavern and Maialino restaurants in New York City,[7] 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.[8]
Most recently, Kushner’s work has been included in several national and international museum exhibitions focusing on the Pattern and Decoration movement: With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2019-2020); Less is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design, Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2019); Pattern and Decoration: Ornament as Promise, Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung, Vienna, Austria, and Ludwig Museum, Budapest, Hungary (2018-2019); Pattern, Decoration & Crime, MAMCO, Geneva, Switzerland, and Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2019).[14]
In his early career, Kushner participated in solo and group performance art. Many of these performances featured costumes that Kushner created with craft techniques such as sewing and embroidery.[15] His first performance, entitled Costumes for Moving Bodies, occurred in 1971 during the artist's senior exhibition at the University of California San Diego. The following year, Kushner began incorporating food into his clothing-based performances.[16] Kushner created two performances in 1972 that featured food costumes. The first, Costumes Constructed and Eaten, was presented at the Jack Glenn Gallery in Corona del Mar, California, and the second, Robert Kushner and Friends Eat Their Clothes, in New York. Both of these performances ended with the audience eating the garments.[17] According to the artist, the primary artistic elements of such food performances would be the “ephemeral composition of all the costumes together, the observation of their disintegration through the act of eating, and the lingering sense of gustatory titillation.”[15]
He has also published scholarly articles in a variety of publications. Most recently, he edited the publication Amy Goldin: Art in a Hairshirt (2011),[18] a compilation of the art critic Goldin's essays.
A monograph on Kushner's three decades of artistic work, Gardens of Earthly Delight, was published by Hudson Hills Press in 1997.[20] Wild Gardens, a selection of Kushner's recent paintings with an essay by Michael Duncan, was published by Pomegranate in 2006.
Anderson-Spivy, Alexandra. “Robert Kushner: Gardens of Earthly Delight,” New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1997.[20]
Robert Kushner: Silk Road, essay by Justin Spring (DC Moore Gallery, 2008).
Robert Kushner, On Location, interview by Peter Eleey (DC Moore Gallery, 2007).
Robert Kushner: Wild Gardens, Pomegranate, 2006, essay by Michael Duncan.[21]
Robert Kushner: Opening Doors, introduction by Bridget Moore, essay by Robert Kushner (DC Moore Gallery, 2004).[22]
Robert Kushner: Hot!! Essay by Howard Rogers (DC Moore Gallery, 2001).
Robert Kushner: The Language of Flowers, essay by Donald Kuspit, foreword by Bridget Moore (DC Moore Gallery, 1998).[23]
Robert Kushner: The Language of Flowers, 1998 (exhibition catalogue)
Robert Kushner: Hot!!, 2001 (exhibition catalogue)
Robert Kushner: Opening Doors, 2004 (exhibition catalogue)
Robert Kushner: On Location, 2007 (exhibition catalogue)
Robert Kushner: Silk Road, 2009 (exhibition catalogue)
Robert Kushner: New Paintings / New Collages, 2012 (exhibition catalogue)
^ abKushner, Robert (2004). "Food + Clothing =". Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies. 4: 77–85. doi:10.1525/gfc.2004.4.1.77.
^Meyers-Kingsley, Dara; Morris, Catherine (2001). "Off the Wall: The Development of Robert Kushner's Fashion and Performance Art, 1970-1976". Fashion Theory.
