Catch Air
Robin Rhode

Thu, Apr 2 - Sun, July 26, 2009
Wexner Center Galleries

This substantial solo exhibition—the artist's first in a U.S. museum and the Wexner Center's first organized by Senior Curator Catharina Manchanda—brings you a firsthand look at his intriguing work.

Raised in Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa, and now based in Berlin, Robin Rhode has emerged in the last decade as a highly influential artist. From an acute personal perspective shaped by South Africa's history of racial discrimination, he highlights the push and pull between the liberating force of the individual's imagination and the confines of media-driven stereotypes.

In many of his best-known projects, Rhode draws crude, life-size outlines of everyday objects on house facades or city streets and interacts with them as if they were the actual physical objects. Here, he'll chart his development with some 20 key examples of wide ranging work: photographic storyboards, animations, films, and performances shown in video documentation. In some he focuses on street activities such as gambling, drinking, or theft. Others stage sequences in which he appears as an imaginary sports superstar, music performer, or magician. Eager to engage the Wexner Center's architecture, Rhode has also developed an installation specifically for our lower lobby. There and throughout the show, you can see how the artist gives a radical twist to techniques such as illusionism and site specificity, reenergizing them as fresh and potent tools.

Catch Air - Robin Rhode

Organized by the Wexner Center.

Want an unusual addition to your library of contemporary art books? Check out the brand new, limited-edition Wexner Center catalogue Catch Air: Robin Rhode. The handsome book offers two essays and an extensive interview with the artist, plus numerous illustrations including eight oversize, foldout portfolio pages. The book is also available in a special Collector's Edition exclusively from the Wexner Center Store. This edition of 50 books, each signed and dated by Rhode, features an embroidered blue polyester "book jacket" that recalls the warm-up jacket artist Rhode wears in many of his signature works.

Keep reading for complete image credits.

Press release


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