In Robert Kushner: By My Window, the artist's sustained engagement with decorative and modernist traditions achieves a new level of formal and conceptual sophistication, as evidenced by paintings that interrogate the boundaries between “high” and “low” cultural production. Building upon his foundational role in the Pattern and Decoration movement—whose theoretical propositions concerning globalism, feminism, and the decorative have gained renewed urgency in contemporary discourse, as demonstrated by recent institutional reappraisals at MUMOK, MAMCO, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles—Kushner's latest body of work synthesizes references to his early fabric installations and performances with a rigorous investigation of Indian textile traditions, resulting in monumental floral compositions that transcend mere botanical representation to become meditations on memory, cultural exchange, and the persistent tension between painterly autonomy and decorative excess. Kushner constructs what curator Manuela Ammer terms a “complicated dialogue” with both the history of pure painting and the anonymous artisans whose textile innovations continue to inform his practice, producing works that celebrate the radical potential of ornament while expanding the critical framework through which we understand pattern's role in contemporary artistic production.

Published by DC Moore Gallery, New York, 2019

Interview with the artist by Manuela Ammer

Designed by Joseph Guglietti

Fully illustrated, 28 pages

Selected Publications