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Robert Otto Epstein
Robert Otto Epstein tells us about influences and processes in his paintings, along with the value of outsider perspectives.
I've always been interested in modes of production, the machinery of "making." I like to consider the body at work in the vein of Gilles Delheuze's "desiring machine" as a kind of round-the-clock factory setting where the assembly of "being" and "doing" and its creative wares are one in the same.
About the Artist
Robert Otto Epstein (b. 1979) is a New Jersey-based artist whose work is heavily inspired by deconstructionist philosophy, writing, language, and systems, and the way these disciplines intersect. His gridded drawings and paintings began after becoming interested in instructional guides for knitting - the guides provide a coded plan for creation that is divorced from scale or context. Robert’s drawings on paper build up a “scaffolding” of between 23,000 and 38,000 individual, meticulously hand-drawn squares to create works that evoke pixelated JPGs or rich tapestries, finally removing what remains of the grid to bring the patterned object into focus. He studied philosophy and political science at the University of Pittsburgh and law at the University of Durham in the UK.
Exhibited at Project Art Space, 2021
Solo exhibition, This is Heavy, High Noon Gallery, 2019
Featured in Vice, 2017
