303 Gallery is pleased to announce our third solo exhibition of new work by Rob Pruitt. The exhibition is comprised of time-based works from the artist's ongoing investigations of the spectral gradient. Paintings and works on paper, scaled from intimate to grand, capture moments, hours, days, months, and years. Each day of the show will have a different title. It will open as “Skyscapes,” and on each subsequent day, Pruitt will improvise and announce the next title.
Pruitt has utilized gradient fields of color in different, evolving series of paintings since 2012. In Pruitt’s Suicide Paintings, gradient fields within gradient frames suggest doors or windows, forming deep corridors of psychological space. Void of figuration and monumental in scale, the Suicide Paintings radiate intensity and possess a meditative quality.
The latest gradient works employ actual, functioning clocks, with the clock face and frame painted to correspond with a moment in time. A row of 12 clocks run in sync, with the first clock painted to represent the darkness of midnight. Each subsequent clock is painted to track the progression of the day in 2-hour intervals. When the hour strikes for the time of day that the clock represents, the hands of the clock fade away into the colors of the clock face.
With Pruitt's multi-panel 24 Hour Paintings, gradients are used to map time with color. Based on his diaristic iPhone photos of the sky, these paintings are comprised of 24 canvases, each panel representing an hour of the day. The colors are meticulously mixed and spray painted to encapsulate the movement of light.
In a new calendar series indebted to On Kawara’s Date Paintings, Pruitt uses the iconic Massimo Vignelli Stendig calendar as a framework for the natural world, rendering each morning’s sunrise in watercolor.
Gone are the appointments, events and reminders written in each box – instead, the spaces serve as an open ended, animation of passing time.
All of the works in the show reflect the impulse to capture fleeting moments of time. Another way to capture time is to caption it, as Pruitt does with the activity of changing the title of the show daily. As abstract and open to projection as the works are, this suggestion of shifting one’s perspective conveys the notion that the works can be refreshed ad infinitum.
Rob Pruitt (b. Washington D.C., 1964) has shown internationally since the early 1990’s, with exhibitions at Rebuild Foundation, Chicago (2019); Kunsthalle Zurich, Zurich (2017); the Brant Foundation in Greenwich (2015); Aspen Art Museum (2013); Dallas Contemporary (2011); Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2015); Freiburg Kunstverein (2012); Le Consortium, Dijon (2002); and group shows at Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome (2012); Tate Modern (2009); Punta Della Dogana/Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2009). In 2011, Public Art Fund commissioned Pruitt’s Andy Monument, a chrome-plated, seven-foot-tall statue of Andy Warhol, in New York’s Union Square. He lives and works in New York.
ROB PRUITT'S ARTIST STATEMENT:
“Tragedy, like joy, can fall out of the sky.
When I was working on this show, my sister Gina suffered multiple strokes and was rendered paralyzed from the neck down, unable to speak. She made the decision to stop treatment and end her life on her own terms. This changed the show for me and I changed the show.
As I sat with Gina and recounted memories from our childhood, I thought about what she might be experiencing. She liked the room filled with light and liked to face the sun, even with her eyes closed. I imagined that she might be seeing bright, vivid colors.
The suicide paintings started for me as an expression of my own social anxiety. They were about punching a hole through a wall to make an escape, leaving one space and entering another space. With the paintings I made for Gina, the metaphor became literal. But not suicide from a place of darkness and depression. Just a choice.
Also, while the show was coming together, I could hear my partner Jonathan Horowitz from the room next door, working day after day on a video project. He never told me what the video was about, but I would occasionally hear familiar fragments – a Village People song, clips from the movies Cruising with Al Pachino and Saturday Night Fever, chanting political rioters. When Jonathan was finished and showed me the work, I was blown away. It’s called Father land: Wilhelm Reich, Jacques Morali, et al. and it’s about hyper masculinity and gay history and the political nightmare that we’re all living through today. Somehow, the particularity of his work seemed like a perfect counterpoint to the generality of mine. I asked him if I could put his video in the project room of the gallery, coming through the wall like at our house.
These were my days when I made the show. They are embedded within the work.”
Rob Pruitt
ON VIEW IN PROJECT ROOM:
Jonathan Horowitz: Father land: Wilhelm Reich, Jacques Morali, et al.
Father land: Wilhelm Reich, Jacques Morali, et al. explores the psychology of hyper masculine gender identity, both as it took root in gay culture in the 1970s, and as it is manifested in authoritarian political ideology. The starting point for the work is Donald Trump’s adoption of the gay, disco anthem YMCA as his de facto theme song. The work is largely comprised of found footage — most prominently from the Clint Eastwood movie Escape from Alcatraz and from three Hollywood movies that engage with the subject of male homosexuality — Cruising, Making Love, and Can’t Stop the Music. Narration from two found documentaries is intercut throughout, telling the stories of Wilhelm Reich, the Austrian psychoanalyst and lay scientist, and Jacques Morali, the French impresario and founder of the Village People. Horowitz’s recorded voice is employed as well — at times disguised through AI voice filtering. Numerous other characters and stories come into play, laying bare the travails of gay identity that typified the late seventies, early eighties and pointing to the patriarchal underpinnings of fascism, from Nazi Germany to the USA today.
Jonathan Horowitz (b. New York, 1966) has made art across mediums that engages critically with politics and culture for over three decades. His recent project, The Future Will Follow the Past: An Exhibition by Jonathan Horowitz, ran from 2022-25 at the Weitzman National Museum of Jewish American History. In 2012, his exhibition Your Land/My Land: Election ’12 was presented concurrently at seven museums across the US, from the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles to the New Museum, New York. He lives and works in New York.