ROBERT GRANT: ROBERTA’S REVENGE / January 20–February 19, 2006

 

 
“Roberta’s Revenge” by Robert Grant features paintings, xeroxes, colored self images, and props, all exploring the various sources from which identity and inspiration simultaneously emerge. The three major works in the exhibition are paintings of women’s dresses, which symbolize the feminine persona of Roberta Magenta, the artist’s doppelganger and muse. They are accompanied by several dramatic self-portraits of Roberta, each featured in gaudy or sentimental store-bought frames reminiscent of those found in a middle-class family home, each portraying the same face in alternating tones and colors, as if the woman in them were reinvented with each photographic treatment. The projection of the artist into a female persona is meant as an affirmation of his inspirations, which are accessible both from a personal and a universal perspective. He subverts cultural stereotypes while at the same time answering the call of inspiration from a source close to his human origins, highly connected to early family relationships. Grant brings us as close to his subject as his formal sensibility will allow, but holds back from telling all of his secrets, both because they are a private matter bound in introspection and doubt, and because he is actively engaged in creating a mystery through which both reason and identity can travel. The two bodies of work on view in “Roberta’s Revenge” offer a singular yet expansive perspective on the struggle to achieve an identity. The paintings of dresses are each in their own way an evocation of the absent wearer, yet by themselves they possess a totemic vigor, a painterly rigor, and a delight in fantasy and whimsy. Combined with the woman depicted in various home-styled portraits, a dramatic persona armed with both beauty and aggression, we see the mystery from both sides. Grant’s art is both suggestive and demonstrative in its espousal of a role that defines us rather than him.