Rob Wynne: Remember Me
After studying at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in the 1970's, Rob Wynne became friends with Ray Jonhson (great promoter of American Mail art and founder of the New York Correspondence School). Besides the long correspondence of postal works which followed, it is the use of textual matter which became the connecting thread of Rob Wynne's art. Since then, Rob Wynne has been freely appropriating fragments of texts and images taken from literature, opera, theater or visual arts. Combining these references to different media and techniques, both traditional (embroidery, for example) or contemporary (digital printing), he creates a universe which is characterized both by romantic nostalgia and caustic humor. Rob Wynne's work makes regularly use of the contrast between attractive, refined aesthetics, and stiffer, generally repelling motifs (spiders, flies, snakes ...).
The Exhibition "REMEMBER ME" by Rob Wynne is based on the Henry Purcell Opera, Dido and Aeneas with a libretto from the play The Enchanted Lovers (1678). Wynne transforms this tale of love and death into an atmospheric interplay between allegory and symbolism. Using materials as diverse as glass, language, embroidery and digital imagery, he alludes to the tragedy of the story, while changing the final scene "When I Am Laid To Earth" Dido's lament "REMEMBER ME, but forget my fate" into a metaphor of transcendence and redemption. Using Vortexes and Exhales of Breath and Unicorn Horns, Wynne turns the haunting ending of the Opera into a stunning visual commentary of escape from contemporary life.
This exhibition is an occasion to discover the most recent paintings of the artist, including a spectacular vortex made of hundreds of pieces of glass. Poured glass has become one of the specificities of Rob Wynne's work and is in the center of this exhibition, in which several glass texts (taken from readings and language fragments) will be next to works from the Exhale series. Paying a tribute to Chardin's soap bubble, this series represents emanations (of oxygen, of gas) whose short-lived upward movement is congealed in the work's materiality. Some embroidered drawings and prints on canvas will complete this ensemble which offers a coherent reading of the work developed by Wynne during the past thirty years.
Rob Wynne has had several solo shows in Europe and the United States. His works appear in the most prestigious collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art's or the Whitney Museum's, the Philadelphia Museum of Art's of in the Fonds régional d'art contemporain des pays de la Loire in France.
