Robert Bordo

Robert Bordo is a New York-based, Canadian-American artist known for paintings that blend modernist formal concerns with postmodern approaches to image, subject matter and metaphor. Throughout his career, he has worked in painting series positioned between representation and abstraction that critics characterize as conceptually structured, yet sensual in execution. These series explore recurring, often overlapping themes, such as memory and experience, the passage of time, landscape and weather phenomena, mapping, and mark-making as an indicator of thought. New York Times critic Roberta Smith described Bordo's early map paintings as charting an idiosyncratic "hybrid discipline … a kind of cartographically conscious rerouting of modernism"; in a 2019 New Yorker review of his "crackup" paintings, Andrea Scott wrote, "Bordo's imagery is an apt metaphor for our current, contentious political climate, but his true subject is painting itself: how easily it can tip realism into abstraction or shift figure-ground relations until it's impossible to discern whether you’re on the inside looking out or vice versa."

Bordo's work belongs to several public art collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Hammer Museum. He has also received a Robert De Niro, Sr. Prize and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Canada Council, among other recognition.

Education and early career Bordo was born in Montreal, Canada in 1949.

In 1977, Bordo moved into a loft in Hoboken, New Jersey that he shared with choreographer Mark Morris. Stabat Mater (1986), Dance critic Joan Acocella wrote that Bordo's "brooding" backdrop for Dido and Aeneas (derived from his abstracted map paintings of the time) "read [not] as fact, but as idea—a projection, of Aeneas’s [tragic] duty" and the vastness of the world and history compared to the individual. His first major solo exhibitions were held at Brooke Alexander Gallery in New York (1987–1992) and Mira Godard Gallery in Toronto (1991). In 1995, he joined the faculty at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York, heading its painting program from 1996 to 2017. He became a faculty member of Bard College's MFA painting program in 2010.

Artwork and reception

Bordo's painting series are intuitive in their development, often originating from ruminations on banal images, objects or clichés, which give way to explorations of the space, vocabulary and material practice of painting. Cohen distinguishes Bordo from both groups in his greater focus on "painterly experience" and the physical qualities of color, substance and application.

Early series (1988–1998) In his early work, Bordo sought to integrate an abstract painting language with subject matter and metaphors related to landscape, social narratives, modernism, and his personal history as a Canadian and Montrealer living in New York. In simple, frontal works, he distilled a sense of light, space and place into a minimum of color and surface incident—brushy, wet-into-wet stretches of mint, blue or taupe overlaid with dots, daubs, tiny brushstrokes, or slabs—pushing the limits of suggestive representation (e.g., Another Day, 2005). Roberta Smith wrote that the thick, wet-on-wet paint handling, blurred transparencies and fractured spaces of broken center lines and red lights created "an effect that is deliciously and darkly comic, but also abstract and rather ham-handedly beautiful." His "Skinny Jeans" paintings (2016) developed out of the self-portraits, as he simultaneously saw the eyeglasses in them as back pockets on jeans. and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2012), Ballinglen Foundation (2010), Tesuque Foundation (1998), MacDowell (1994), and Canada Council (1991, 1977). Blanton Museum of Art, Birmingham Museum of Art, Colby College Museum of Art Alex Katz Collection, Hammer Museum, and Weatherspoon Art Museum, among others.