Rob Pruitt
The controversial, post-pop artist using humor to articulate social critiques.
The work of Rob Pruitt combines humor and images of consumer culture to present poignant social critiques.
The trademark of his oeuvre — a panda pattern that he has recreated in several series of paintings- uses the repetition of the bear’s image to illustrate the effects of reproduction in a culture of consumption.
He illustrates how the image of the panda, imbued with the bear’s status as an endangered species, looses this poignant importance when repeated to such an extent: the powerful image dissolves into a black and white pattern.
Pruitt also plays upon viewers’ fondness of the bear with this resulting pattern.
He revealed his first series of panda paintings in 2001, hoping that the lovable bears could rebrand him, moving away from the controversies of his earlier career such as a highly divisive exhibition in the early 1990s that effectively exiled Pruitt from the art world for several years.
“I see it as a kind of corporate damage control — like trying to market Perrier after they found benzene in it, or Firestone tires after they exploded. I was a reviled figure, but everybody loves a panda.”
- Rob Pruitt
Pruitt confirmed that his career had moved past his earlier scandals and solidified his place within the contemporary art scene with his 2010 exhibit at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, “Pattern and Degradation.”
Building off of the black and white motif established with his famous panda images, Pruitt created a series of stacked tire sculptures in which white paint was used to highlight the tires’ patterns.
The sculptures offered a bowl of candy to visitors within the last tire, referencing the Christian ritual of communion from a comparatively industrial, degraded vessel.
This degradation of the tire vessel also contains an inherent critique of all those who chose to take from its candy offering. Thus Pruitt combines the sacred with the debased to examine how mass consumption degrades both the object and act of consumption.
Born in Washington D.C., Rob Pruitt now lives and works in New York City. He has had solo exhibitions Gavin Brown’s enterprise in New York, the Brant Foundation in Greenwhich, Connecticut, Public Art Fund in New York, Air de Paris in Paris and Art Basel in Basel. His work has also been included at the PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, Paul Kasmin in New York and the Flag Art Foundation in New York.
You can now acquire a Rob Pruitt fountain and textile as part of the Outdoor Contemporary sale on artlist.co.
This post was written with the help of Alice Mahoney.
