Robert Bordo, Sam Anderson with Michel Auder at the Bortolami Gallery

Bortolami is pleased to announce an exhibition by Robert Bordo and Sam Anderson with Michel Auder. The
exhibition explores the contingencies that transpire when three artists present discrete works of painting,
sculpture, and video together for the first time.

 

Ten works by Bordo painted between 1989 and now hang in all gallery rooms, creating unexpected pairings
between past and present works. Bordo’s first exhibited paintings in New York during the late 1980s were
abstract landscapes; embedded cartographies covered in dun colors of grey-gold and watery blues and
greens. In the 1990s, Bordo began making dense, textural monochromatic works with patterns, speech
bubbles, stars, and footprints. He also began outlining some of these works in the red, white, and blue stripes
of airmail envelopes, anticipating his Postcard Paintings in which he depicted landscapes from postcards and
photographs on monochromatic canvases. Bordo’s recent works continue to alter viewers’ experience of the
picture plane and its framework, fixing their gaze outwards from the vantage point of car windshields, rearview
mirrors, eyeglasses, windows and screens, everyday locations, where thoughts and emotions, content and
abstraction merge.

 

Sam Anderson’s female figures, molded in grey epoxy clay, stand, crouch, and sit on the gallery floor. Their
stern expressions suggest exasperation, as if their displeasure stems from their laborious conception. The
sculptures are unadorned, save for a few wearing overalls like Disney kids of indeterminable ages. The narrative
is irrelevant—what is leftover is a sense of deliberate positioning, peculiar materiality, and general unease. In
the second room, Anderson and Michel Auder present four new works that only emerge as collaborations in
situ. Anderson’s white epoxy clay figures and a found transparent figurine lie in repose on pedestals watching
Auder’s videos of the curious scenes he encounters day-to-day or finds online. On one screen a techno rave
rages unabated as the beat resounds through the room. Other screens display disparate, impromptu iPhone
videos, such as butterflies gathering on a field in slow motion, the passing scenery viewed from a bus with bluetinted
windows, and a magician’s sleight of hand. The sculptural spectators converge with the moving images
as they absorb the glow emitted by the monitors.

 

While the artists share geographic and spatial proximity, the connections between the artworks in the exhibition
appear slowly. There is, however, an associative schema that surfaces. Lacking narrative, one is forced
to reckon with each work’s strange familiarity; their moods and tones, their positioning in the space, their
materiality, their unease. By putting individual elements in close proximity to one another—without a specific
reason or thesis, associations between works inevitably arise. Bordo and Anderson, along with Auder, allow
and provoke, perhaps unwittingly, the inevitable recollection of shared, generic memories.

Start Date

April 28, 2016

End Date

June 18, 2016

Hours

10:00 AM - 06:00 PM

Address

Bortolami Gallery, 520 W 20th St, New York, NY 10011

Event Type

Public

More Information

Bortolami Gallery

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