10-Year Survey Opens May 4 at the Neuberger Museum of Art
South African artist Robin Rhode grew up during the volatile period just before Nelson Mandela became president. “I remember when teachers stopped teaching for weeks. We called it “Chalk Down.” With stolen chalk, he would draw illegally bicycles on walls “because we couldn’t afford to own bikes. You didn’t go to school with a bicycle, so it became an extension of a desire.” The everyday objects that he drew later were incorporated into his artistic production. “The South African mentality has to do with freedom, and with the possibility of imagining or reinventing another world quite rapidly.”
Rhode has won the 2014 Roy R. Neuberger Exhibition Prize and will enjoy a ten-year survey of his work (primarily animations) at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York from May 4 through August 10, 2014. These exuberant animations, seen in “Robin Rhode: Animating the Everyday and created in the streets, studios, and homes in Johannesburg and Berlin where he now lives and works, transform the quotidian into the playful and fantastic.
