Robert Bordo

Robert Bordo is an Associate Professor of Art at the Cooper Union where he leads the painting program. In 2003, he was a visiting critic for the MFA program at Yale University and the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland as well as a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome.

Mr. Bordo’s new color paintings offer abstract pictorial elements of brushstroke and staggered dotted line to describe the ruminative quality of experience. Interior logic pervades these naturalistic paintings where light, atmosphere and narrative meet. Meandering dots and dashes refer to weather or wandering; rippled surfaces act interchangeably as water, sky or ground – all locations where everyday images, thoughts and emotion run together. In some of these paintings the postcard collage structures of Bordo’s recent work on memory dissolve into a rush of brushstrokes obliterating the discreet boundaries of specific images and time that the dotted line then seeks to retain.

Robert Bordo is represented by Alexander and Bonin where he will be the subject of a one-person exhibition in September, 2005. He has also exhibited with Galerie René Blouin, Montreal, and Mira Godard, Toronto. A catalogue of his work with an accompanying essay by David Deitcher was published in conjunction with Brooke Alexander and Mira Godard on the occasion of a double exhibition in 1990-91. He has collaborated with the choreographer Mark Morris designing sets and costumes for several dances, including Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas which premiered in 1989 in Brussels and was revived in 1998 at Brooklyn Academy of Music. He has been a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony and a recipient of Canada Council Art Grants and a grant from the Tesuque Foundation.