Rob Wynne: A Distant Mirror
Rob Wynne began his artistic career in the late 1970s already exploring the guiding thread of his work: textual material. The artist collects quotes and images; he freely appropriates existing fragments that he draws from literature, popular culture, visual arts or even everyday conversations. After extracting them from their context, he combines and juxtaposes them, creating new associations that are at times poetic and at times suffused with wry humor. This quoting practice is expressed through the use of traditional techniques, such as embroidery, ceramics or the use of glass, which give a refined character to his works.
In his exhibition A Distant Mirror, Rob Wynne explores a visual field on the border between reality and illusion, linked to the world of magic. For instance, he unveils three new abstractions entitled Hocus Pocus (2015), Silver Horizon (2015) and Black Lagoon (2014). Composed of hundreds of glass elements, these mural choreographies evoke both wonderful and disturbing landscapes, an impression also conveyed by their titles. The mural sculpture Abracadabra (2015), made of poured glass, is typical of Rob Wynne's work. With this magic spell, the artist brings the visitor into the second part of the exhibition, which is an explicit reference to the world of magic. Indeed, the artist presents a series of shiny textual drawings alongside a set of monoprints in which images of sorcery and sleight of hand are mounted onto glittery backgrounds, thereby reinforcing the visual diversion inherent to magic tricks. This exhibition is also a chance to discover a new series of object-sculptures made of mirror-polished bronze (dated 2016), created with offcuts of glass taken from the workshop furnaces in which the artist usually produces his pieces, and sculptures made from a ceramic cast of his hands, with glass eyes in their palm. Reminiscent of the surrealist tradition, this piece underlines the disembodiment, the sense of manipulation, and the blurring of reality and illusion explored throughout the exhibition.
Rob Wynne was born in 1950 in New York where he lives and works. The Norton Museum of Art (Florida) organized a solo show of his work in 2012. His works can be found among the collections of prestigious museums such as the MoMA and the Whitney Museum in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, but also in the collections of the FRAC Pays de la Loire and of the Bibliothèque Nationale [National Library] in Paris.
