Biography

Andy Robert is a painter who balances abstraction with recognizable imagery, and enjoys the experimentation and tinkering that comes with painting pictures. His work relies on the idea that images are to be bent and folded, taken apart and put back together again; a belief that art is a philosophical means to look at and examine things—to question, test ideas, and engage with the world. And that in painting a picture something is being taken apart to put back together; there is an inherent risk in breaking it. As a Haitian-American immigrant and painter, Robert views the world critically as a contradiction of mass-communication and increased voicelessness. Robert's work has been exhibited in Los Angeles at Blum & Poe, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery; domestically at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and internationally at the Bienal de las Fronteras at the Instituto Tamaulipeco para la Cultura y las Artes, Tamaulipas, Mexico; and at the Paris Avant Premiere, Paris, France. His 2017 solo exhibition LAKOU: ONE TWO FIVE was presented at Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles. He is the recipient of a California Community Foundation Fellowship Award for Visual Arts Grant, a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Artadia Awards (2018) and the William H. Johnson Prize (2017). Robert holds an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts, and also attended the Whitney Independent Study Program, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Studio Museum in Harlem Artist in Residency Program.