Robert Ginder: Phenomenon
December 7, 2024 - January 25, 2025
Opening Reception: December 7, 4-6pm
Inventing his own iconographies, Robert Ginder deploys the techniques of the Old Masters to reinterpret the architecture and environs of contemporary Southern California, with all its resplendent pick-up trucks and palm trees.
In Phenomenon, the mundane becomes spiritual and significant through recontextualization and juxtaposition. Using Trecento elements like gold leaf and elaborate framing, Ginder glorifies the modest bungalows of Los Angeles, creating contemporary secular icons that border on humorous, but remain reverent. He also transforms traditional nature and still life paintings into curious scenes: jets of cosmic detritus shoot across Arts and Craft-style images of ripe grapes and blooming flowers, while flames lick at the edges of delicate still lifes, threatening their perfect florals and fruits. These subtly uncanny combinations—this “tension of opposites,” as Ginder describes it—invites us to pause, and consider perception itself—is not unlike the sensation described by Lautréamont, as beautiful as "the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella."
