Robert Bordo is a New York-based, Canadian-American artist known for paintings that blend modernist formal concerns with postmodern approaches to image, subject matter and metaphor.
[Pardee, Hearne. "Robert Bordo," ''Arts'', September 1989.][Hanna, Deirdre. "Bordo's Unconventional Landscapes Map Potential for Cultural Change," ''Now Magazine'', (Toronto), February 28, 1991.][Sam, Sherman]
"500 Words: Robert Bordo,"
''Artforum'', March 3, 2013. Retrieved February 16, 2022. Throughout his career, he has worked in painting series positioned between representation and abstraction that critics characterize as conceptually structured, yet sensual in execution.
[Eleey, Peter]
"Robert Bordo,"
''Frieze'', June 7, 2002. Retrieved February 17, 2022.[Maine, Stephen. "Robert Bordo at Alexander and Bonin," ''Art in America'', February 2006, p. 131–2.][Cohen, David]
"Robert Bordo: it’s always raining at Alexander and Bonin,"
''artcritical'', September 22, 2008. Retrieved February 17, 2022.[Deitcher, David. "Robert Bordo at Alexander and Bonin," ''Texte Zur Kunst'', June 1999.] These series explore recurring, often overlapping themes, such as memory and experience, the passage of time, landscape and weather phenomena, mapping, and mark-making as an indicator of thought.
[Glueck, Grace]
'The New York Times'', April 16, 1999, p. E35. Retrieved February 17, 2022.[Schwabsky, Barry]
"Robert Bordo,"
''Artforum'', June 2012. Retrieved February 17, 2022.[Heinrich, Will]
''The New York Times'', May 18, 2017., p. C17 Retrieved February 16, 2022.[Jones, Nicholas John]
"6 December,"
''Nordic Art Review – Kunstkritikk'', December 6, 2019. Retrieved February 16, 2022. ''New York Times'' critic
Roberta Smith described Bordo's early map paintings as charting an idiosyncratic "hybrid discipline … a kind of cartographically conscious rerouting of modernism";
[Smith, Roberta]
"Robert Bordo,"
''The New York Times'', April 7, 1989, p. C22. Retrieved February 16, 2022. in a 2019 ''New Yorker'' review of his "crackup" paintings, Andrea Scott wrote, "Bordo's imagery is an apt metaphor for our current, contentious political climate, but his true subject is painting itself: how easily it can tip realism into abstraction or shift figure-ground relations until it's impossible to discern whether you’re on the inside looking out or vice versa."
[Scott, Andrea]
"Robert Bordo,"
''The New Yorker'', December 18, 2019. Retrieved February 16, 2022.
Bordo's work belongs to several public art collections, including the
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
[The Metropolitan Museum of Art]
''Coast (Columbus)'', 1987, Robert Bordo
Art Collection. Retrieved February 21, 2022. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
[San Francisco Museum of Modern Art]
Robert Bordo
Artist. Retrieved February 21, 2022. and
Hammer Museum
The Hammer Museum, which is affiliated with the University of California, Los Angeles, is an art museum and cultural center known for its artist-centric and progressive array of exhibitions and public programs. Founded in 1990 by the entrepreneur- ...
.
In 2007, he was awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...
.
[John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation]
"Robert Bordo,"
Fellows. Retrieved February 16, 2022. He has also received a
Robert De Niro, Sr. Prize and awards from the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, and
Canada Council, among other recognition.
[Chiaverina, John]
"Robert Bordo Wins 2014 Robert De Niro Sr. Prize,"
''ARTnews'', December 3, 2014. Retrieved February 16, 2022.[American Academy of Arts and Letters]
Purchase Fund Award
Retrieved February 21, 2022.[The Canada Council. "20th Annual Report 1976–7'', 1977.]
Education and early career
Bordo was born in Montreal, Canada in 1949.
He attended
McGill University in Montreal from 1967 to 1970. He was dissatisfied at the time with the dominance of
hard-edge abstraction
Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Co ...
in Montreal, and left to take up studies at the
New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture with
Philip Guston and
Mercedes Matter, among others, from 1972 to 1974.
[DiBenedetto, Steve. "Robert Bordo in Conversation with Steve DiBenedetto," ''Turps Banana'', Summer 2010, p. 14–28.]
In 1977, Bordo moved into a loft in
Hoboken, New Jersey that he shared with choreographer
Mark Morris.
[Acocella, Joan]
''Mark Morris''
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004. Retrieved February 21, 2022. He collaborated with Morris on several dance productions between 1983 and 1995, creating set designs, costumes and posters for works staged at
Lincoln Center,
Brooklyn Academy of Music
The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) is a performing arts venue in Brooklyn, New York City, known as a center for progressive and avant-garde performance. It presented its first performance in 1861 and began operations in its present location in ...
and
Dance Theatre Workshop, among other venues.
[Kisselgoff, Anna]
"Mark Morris Company,"
''The New York Times'', November 13, 1986, p. C25. Retrieved February 17, 2022.[Dunning, Jennifer]
''The New York Times'', March 18, 2006, p. B12. Retrieved February 17, 2022. These works included ''The Death of Socrates'' (1983),
the danced
Purcell opera ''Dido and Aeneas'' (1989–2012),
[Kisselgoff, Anna]
"Purcell’s 'Dido and Aeneas' As Mark Morris Sees It,"
''The New York Times'', June 9, 1989. Retrieved February 17, 2022. ''Stabat Mater'' (1986),
and ''Paukenschlag'' (1993).
[Kisselgoff, Anna]
''The New York Times'', May 5, 1993, p. C15. Retrieved February 17, 2022. Dance critic
Joan Acocella wrote that Bordo's "brooding" backdrop for ''
Dido and Aeneas'' (derived from his abstracted map paintings of the time) "read
otas fact, but as idea—a projection, of Aeneas’s
ragicduty" and the vastness of the world and history compared to the individual.
[Acocella, Joan. "The Long Journey," ''The Opera Quarterly'', Summer 2015, p. 182–5.]
During the first decade of his art career, Bordo exhibited in solo shows at the New York Studio School and
Concordia University
Concordia University ( French: ''Université Concordia'') is a public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1974 following the merger of Loyola College and Sir George Williams University, Concordia is one of the t ...
(Montreal), group shows at the
Jersey City Museum,
Drawing Center
The Drawing Center is a Manhattan, New York, museum and a nonprofit exhibition space that focuses on the exhibition of drawings, both historical and contemporary.
History
The Drawing Center was founded by former assistant curator of drawings at ...
and
Tampa Museum of Art, and in collaborative projects with poet William Allen and the conceptual collective
Group Material.
[Deitcher, David. ''Robert Bordo: Paintings 1989-1990", New York/Toronto: Brooke Alexander/Mira Godard Gallery, 1990.][Jersey City Museum. ''Eight Painters: Jersey City Museum Invitational'', Jersey City, NJ: Jersey City Museum, 1980.][Allen, William]
''The Man on the Moon: Poems''
New York: New York University Press, 1987. February 28, 2022. His first major solo exhibitions were held at Brooke Alexander Gallery in New York (1987–1992) and Mira Godard Gallery in Toronto (1991).
[Westfall, Stephen. "Robert Bordo at Brooke Alexander," ''Art in America,'' September 1988.][Yau, John. "Robert Bordo's Current Address," ''Cover'', April 1989.][Cyphers, Peggy. "Robert Bordo," ''Arts'', April 1991.][Taylor, Kate. "Geographic Works in Realm of Politics," ''The Globe and Mail'', March 1, 1991.][Gopnick, Adam. "Robert Bordo," ''The New Yorker'', November 1992.] In 1995, he joined the faculty at the
Cooper Union
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (Cooper Union) is a private college at Cooper Square in New York City. Peter Cooper founded the institution in 1859 after learning about the government-supported École Polytechnique in ...
School of Art in New York, heading its painting program from 1996 to 2017.
[The Cooper Union]
"Prof. Robert Bordo Receives 2014 De Niro Prize for Painting,"
News, December 5, 2014. Retrieved February 16, 2022.[Bard College]
/ "Robert Bordo,"
People. Retrieved February 16, 2022. He became a faculty member of Bard College's MFA painting program in 2010.
Bordo maintained studios in both the Hudson Valley in upstate New York and Brooklyn in the first two decades of the 2000s and now works from
Kinderhook, New York.
[''Modern Painters''. "Jeans, Glasses, Faces, Asses" Robert Bordo in Conversation with Cecily Brown and Amy Sillman," September 2016, p. 68-71.][Cameron, Seth]
"Robert Bordo with Seth Cameron,"
''The Brooklyn Rail'', July–August 2016. Retrieved February 17, 2022.
Artwork and reception
Bordo's painting series are intuitive in their development, often originating from ruminations on banal images, objects or clichés, which give way to explorations of the space, vocabulary and material practice of painting.
Critics
David Cohen and Stephen Maine have related Bordo's art to an American tradition of stylized abstraction from nature that includes
Alex Katz and
Milton Avery, while also linking him to critically self-aware contemporary painters such as
Raoul De Keyser,
Thomas Nozkowski
Thomas Nozkowski (March 23, 1944 – May 9, 2019) was an American Contemporary art, contemporary painter. He achieved a place of prominence through his small scale paintings and drawings that push the limits of visual language.
Early life and ed ...
, and
Merlin James
Merlin James (born 1960 in Cardiff, Wales) is an artist living and working in Glasgow, Scotland.
Life and work
James studied at Central School of Art and Design, London, and the Royal College of Art, London. His college thesis, on French artist ...
.
[Naves, Mario]
"Ambiguous Landscapes,"
''he New York Observer'', October 10, 2005. Retrieved February 21, 2022.[Cohen, David]
"The Big Picture at Sikkema Jenkins & Co,"
''artcritical'', July 1, 2012. Retrieved February 17, 2022. Cohen distinguishes Bordo from both groups in his greater focus on "painterly experience" and the physical qualities of color, substance and application.
Bordo's earlier series were noted for lyrical qualities recalling Cézanne and the
color-field painters
Clyfford Still and
Agnes Martin;
[Arning, Bill. "Robert Bordo," ''Time Out New York'', April 1999.][Jones, Alan. "Robert Bordo," ''Flash Art'', March–April 1988.] his later series feature a blunter, more anxious sensibility that writers compare to the late work of Philip Guston.
[Butler, Sharon]
"Ode to Robert Bordo,"
''Two Coats of Paint'', October 2015. Retrieved February 17, 2022.[Rhodes, David]
"Robert Bordo Back Flip,"
''The Brooklyn Rail'', May, 2017. Retrieved February 16, 2022.
Early series (1988–1998)
In his early work, Bordo sought to integrate an abstract painting language with subject matter and metaphors related to landscape, social narratives, modernism, and his personal history as a Canadian and Montrealer living in New York.
He initially painted globes, before turning to two-dimensional landforms and graphic elements, most prominently in his "Map Paintings."
His approach to imagery and form—as well as his suggestive titles—kept this work open to a range of political, historical and physical interpretations.
Stephen Westfall
Stephen Westfall (born 1953 Schenectady, New York) is an American painter, critic, and professor at Rutgers University and Bard College.
Biography
When Stephen Westfall was an adolescent, he was fascinated by the social spaces created by archi ...
described them as "homeless paintings" of drift and restlessness, of area but not place, grounded by concrete qualities of texture, surface and intimate scale.
Other writers identified metaphors involving emigration, journey, change and loss,
[Cotter, Holland]
"Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Bordo,"
''The New York Times'', December 20, 1996, p. C28. Retrieved February 17, 2022. or—citing their military, economic and geographic references—contemporary geopolitical commentary (e.g., ''Hidden Agenda'', ''Thaw'').
Bordo exhibited map paintings in six solo exhibitions between 1987 and 1996.
In these modestly scaled, quasi-minimal canvasses, he rendered the abstract shapes and irregular contours of landmasses from globes in glazes and textured fragments of color, which hovered between topographical suggestions of land, water or sky and abstraction, augmented by camouflage patterns, frames and elements from airmail envelopes, barely visible ledgers and stenciled aircraft forms (e.g., ''Exile'', ''Letter'').
[Smith, Roberta]
''The New York Times'', January 15, 1993, p. C30. Retrieved February 16, 2022. Roberta Smith likened these works to "the infinite spaces" of
Edward Ruscha and
Vija Celmins and the fictional stamp paintings of
Donald Evans.
Bordo's 1990s work also included his "Speech Bubble" and "Denim" paintings.
The former works employ ghostly, hand-painted, empty speech bubbles set against monochrome white or gun-metal gray backgrounds—an iconic reference to speechlessness during the height of the
AIDS crisis.
The "Denim" works employ stenciled bootprints on blue monochromes and consider themes involving mapping, walking, cruising, and queering of the field of painting.
Postcard paintings and landscape abstractions
Bordo began exploring motifs involving abstracted landscape, the presentation of sublime space, and human archiving and recall of image memories in the late 1990s.
In solo shows at Alexander and Bonin (1999 and 2002), he exhibited wide-format paintings featuring small, rectangular landscape abstractions derived from picture postcards his mother had collected. He rendered the images in quiet, carefully limited palettes and a no-frills manner without descriptive detail, then overlapped them in loose grids or clustered constellations over unmodulated, matte grounds (e.g., ''Lookout'', 1999; ''Back Seat'', 2003).
Reviews compared the paintings to work by
Robert Ryman or the "foggy infinitude of Agnes Martin and
Mark Rothko."
''New York Times'' critic
Grace Glueck termed them reticent "mindscapes"—generalized impressions of landscape that others equated to links in the associative chain of private thought and emotions, elusively suggesting the possibility of resolution into coherent subjects or sites.
With exhibitions at Alexander and Bonin, Rubicon Gallery (Dublin) and Mummery + Schnelle (London) between 2005 and 2009, Bordo departed from multi-image postcard works, producing some of his most, understated, abstract paintings.
[Dunne, Aidan. "Blurring the boundaries," ''The Irish Times'', October 2007.] In simple, frontal works, he distilled a sense of light, space and place into a minimum of color and surface incident—brushy, wet-into-wet stretches of mint, blue or taupe overlaid with dots, daubs, tiny brushstrokes, or slabs—pushing the limits of suggestive representation (e.g., ''Another Day'', 2005).
''Art in Americas Stephen Maine wrote that the "muted colors and veiled imagery" evoked an understated theatrical quality of intrigue that prompted viewers "to hang on every painterly syllable … drawn into what seems like an artworld subplot."
Later paintings such as ''Heatwave'' and ''Green Girl'' (both 2008) consisted simply of free, seemingly casual, lyrical brushstrokes, applied in blended colors over a monochrome ground.
Reviews of both shows noted the work's strong connection with nature, in palette and atmospherics, despite the high degree of abstraction.
Later series: windshield, rear-view mirror and "crackup" paintings
Bordo's paintings in the 2010s displayed a new sense of anxiety, reflecting issues such as the dramatic political polarization in the U.S. and climate change.
''Artforums
Barry Schwabsky wrote that these paintings left behind the more delicate, lyrical touch of the landscape works, "evince
nga Gustonesque brusqueness and spleen… with a blunter, more robust facture and a more implacable presence."
This somewhat larger work was more explicitly structured by its imagery—often car windshields and rear-view mirrors, which served as metaphors for consciousness and movement in space and time, forward and backward (e.g., Rear-view, 2011; ''Wacko'', 2012).
[Martin, Cameron]
"Robert Bordo in Conversation with Cameron Martin,"
''The Brooklyn Rail'', April 2013. Retrieved February 16, 2022.
In the "Windshield" paintings, Bordo continued to engage characteristic interests in visual and tactile pleasure, flatness and depth, conflating the picture plane with the windscreens of cars often depicted driving through unpredictable, rainy weather with active wipers (e.g., ''Dial'', ''The Future'', both 2012).
[Smith, Roberta]
''The New York Times'', April 18, 2013, p. C26. Retrieved February 16, 2022. These paintings typically employed a complex sense of space, with overlaps, splits, doublings, changes of scale, and expressive horizontal and vertical lines suggesting journeys anticipated or recalled.
[Heinrich, Will. "Robert Bordo: Three Point Turn at Alexander and Bonin," ''The New York Observer'', April 2, 2013.] Roberta Smith wrote that the thick, wet-on-wet paint handling, blurred transparencies and fractured spaces of broken center lines and red lights created "an effect that is deliciously and darkly comic, but also abstract and rather ham-handedly beautiful."
In the latter half of the 2010s, Bordo developed several offshoots from the windshield paintings. He exhibited loosely painted, abstracted heads rendered with thick, squeegeed paint in "Greater New York" (
MoMA PS1, 2015)—closeups of his own worried face, blurred and moving, in eyeglasses and sometimes smoking a cigar—that emerge from rearview mirrors, box forms or rough grids.
[Hirsch, Faye, "Greater New York," ''Art in America'', December 8. 2015.] His "Skinny Jeans" paintings (2016) developed out of the self-portraits, as he simultaneously saw the eyeglasses in them as back pockets on jeans.
He created the paintings by scraping outlined forms out of dark monochrome surfaces with a palette knife, revealing lines of bright underpainting. Writers described them as both humorous and homoerotic examinations of looking and being looked at, desire and mortality, that refer back to the queer abstraction of his "Denim" paintings.
In 2019 at
Bortolami, Bordo exhibited his "crackup" paintings, which drew upon prior series by employing monochrome grounds and lines incised into wet, oil surfaces that appeared like broken window panes. They depict dark holes on their surfaces, surrounded by spidery cracks that seemingly threaten to shatter further.
The show included nine canvases in moody greens and blues, ranging from imposing (seven feet tall) to intimate (twenty inches), that reflected a contemporary, contentious political climate.
Awards and collections
Bordo has been recognized with a
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...
(2007),
Robert De Niro Sr. Painting Prize (2014),
[The Estate of Robert De Niro, Sr]
"Robert Bordo awarded 2014 Robert De Niro, Sr. Prize,"
December 10, 2014. Retrieved February 16, 2022. and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2012),
(2012),
[New York Foundation for the Arts. ''Directory of Artists' Fellows 1985–2013'', New York: New York Foundation for the Arts, 2013.] Ballinglen Foundation (2010), Tesuque Foundation (1998),
MacDowell (1994), and Canada Council (1991, 1977).
[Macdowell]
"Robert Bordo,"
Artists. Retrieved February 21, 2022.
Bordo's work belongs to the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
Albright-Knox Art Gallery,
[Albright-Knox Art Gallery]
Robert Bordo
Person. Retrieved February 21, 2022. Blanton Museum of Art,
[Blanton Museum of Art]
''Stop 'n' Go'', 1987, Robert Bordo
Collection. Retrieved February 21, 2022. Birmingham Museum of Art,
[Birmingham Museum of Art]
Robert Bordo
Artist. Retrieved February 21, 2022. Colby College Museum of Art Alex Katz Collection,
[Colby College Museum of Art]
Robert Bordo , ''Hushed By Snow''
Museum. Retrieved February 28, 2022. Hammer Museum,
,
Jersey City Museum,
Mississippi Museum of Art
The Mississippi Museum of Art is a public museum in Jackson, Mississippi. It is the largest museum in Mississippi.
Location
It is located at the corner of 380 South Lamar Street and 201 East Pascagoula Street in Jackson, Mississippi.Lee Ellis, ''F ...
,
Norton Museum of Art,
Sheldon Museum of Art,
[Sheldon Museum of Art]
Robert Bordo
Collection. Retrieved February 21, 2022. and
Weatherspoon Art Museum,
[Weatherspoon Art Museum]
Robert Bordo
Artist. Retrieved February 21, 2022. among others.
References
External links
Robert BordoRobert Bordo, Guggenhiem FellowshipRobert Bordo conversation with Cameron Martin
''The Brooklyn Rail'', 2013
Robert Bordo interview with Seth Cameron
''The Brooklyn Rail'', 2016
Robert Bordo
artist page, Bortolami
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bordo, Robert
21st-century American painters
20th-century American painters
21st-century Canadian painters
20th-century Canadian painters
New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture alumni
McGill University alumni
Sculptors from Pennsylvania
Sculptors from Quebec
1949 births
Living people