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Biography
Born in Pasadena, California, graduated in 1971 B.A. Visual Arts, with honors, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla. Robert Kushner, who emerged in the early 1970s as a performance artist whose costumes were as important as the performance, was a founder of the Pattern and Decoration movement of that era. In the early 80s, he was painting the human figure on unstretched fabric. By the late 80s he was painting on canvas concentrating on flowers which he has continued into the present. Although motifs and compositions from Japanese art have greatly influenced Kushner's paintings on canvas and paper for many years, his fourth exhibition at Bellas Artes features paintings on antique Japanese folding screens. The title of the exhibition refers to new paintings on old Japanese screens which Kushner buys from antique auctions, flea markets and thrift shops in Japan and then paints with his usual techniques of oil painting and European gilding rather than the traditional Japanese Nihonga technique. According to Kushner, his screens are closer to the traditions of Western art rather than Japanese screen imagery because of the bold scale of the floral elements, the juxtaposition of outlines and filled forms and the sensation of groundlessness evoked by his use of randomness as a compositional determinant. Kushner has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally. His work is in the collections of many museums including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Tate Gallery in London and the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Recent exhibitions: 2003 “Robert Kushner - Sliding Doors: Homage to John Cage,” DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY; 2004 “Robert Kushner: Opening Doors,”DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY.
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