Robert Kushner: Portraits and Perennials

Robert Kushner poses a challenge to conventional hierarchies of artistic practice through his reconciliation of decorative tradition with modernist abstraction. His increasingly assertive geometric scaffolding provides a rigorous formal counterpoint to his lush botanical imagery, while his intensified chromatic palette generates dynamic tensions between structure and organic form. The conversation in this catalogue situates his work within the lineage of twentieth-century abstraction—from Matisse’s late paper cuts to the chromatic investigations of Newman and Kelly—and contemporary discourse around beauty and decoration in art. Through this probing dialogue with figures from diverse cultural spheres, the catalogue reveals how Kushner's paintings reframe the decorative as a site of serious artistic inquiry in order to assert beauty’s enduring relevance to contemporary artistic practice.

Published by DC Moore, New York, 2017

Interview by twenty-three professional and personal acquaintances of the artist

Designed by Joseph Guglietti

Softcover, fully illustrated, 55 pages

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