LA><ART

LA><ART is pleased to announce Amateurs, an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles

based artist Robert Russell. Russell’s project-oriented exhibition features a series of paintings that

examine the proliferation of images on the Internet, a point of investigation the artist has

consistently engaged with in his work for over a decade. For Amateurs, Russell focuses on the

consumption of online pornography and erotica. Specifically, the artist explores slippages of

meaning, blurred professional and non-professional means of production, and the stylized

renderings associated with the taxonomy of “amateur pornography.” The production,

distribution, and circulation of this content acutely articulates how the hyper-proliferated and

mediated world of online images complicates our understanding of reality and the real. In

painting traditions, Realism has always been inextricably bound to the advent of the camera and

photography. Through use of the camera and in response to photographic image production,

Realism has consistently been an effort by artists to report on their surroundings. American

Realism was felt by its practitioners to be a reaction to the aftermath of war (both the Civil War

and the Vietnam War), industrialization, globalization, and the struggles of the working and

middle classes to cope. Practitioners of Realism wanted to report on a constantly shifting

everyday environment that provided little time for careful reflection. Russell ‘s Amateurs

mobilizes the historical projects of Realism and Photorealism, not by once again claiming to tell a

more truthful story through the techniques of mimetic rendering, but rather by creating works

that insist on our careful viewing of the visible world that is, increasingly, saturated by the infinite

online archive.

About the Artist

Robert Russell is a Los Angeles based artist. His exhibitions include

“Sein und Schein“ Big Pond Artworks, Munich, Germany (2015); “Men Who are Named Named

Robert Russell,” Osmos New York (2013); “Men Who are Named Named Robert Russell,”

Francois Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles (2013); “Masters,” Francois Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles

(2010); “Scattershot,” Anna Helwing Gallery, Los Angeles, 2007.