Untitled, Basin

Born in Cape Town in 1976, Robin Rhode has developed a singularly unique practice combining elements of performance, graffiti and photography. The resulting work usually appears as a Muybridge-esque photographic sequence, detailing and documenting a performance involving painting a wall. Strongly influenced by hip-hop and urban ritual, the works are often humorous and focus on post-apartheid subcultures. Rhode speaks of an experience in high school in which younger students were forced to draw a bicycle on a bathroom wall using chalk, and pressured into pretending to ride it. Although designed to ridicule the younger students, Rhode recognised the game as a humorous and creative means of articulating hierarchy. His deeply irreverent aesthetic is encapsulated in his work Leak (2000), a performance work involving drawing a urinal onto a gallery wall in the South African National Gallery and urinating against it. Referencing Duchamp’s Fountain signed with ‘R. Mutt’, Rhode signed his work ‘R Moet’. Rhode’s male protagonists are always anonymous.
In Untitled, Basin we see a figure dressed in black vigorously applying black paint over a cream coloured wall and a water pipe. The marks on the wall are raw, gestural, even primeval. The photomontage and work as a whole is playful, vital and expressionistic.
Robin Rhode’s work is held in the collections of numerous institutions including MoMA and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center, the Johannesburg Art Gallery and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Robin Rhode lives and works in Berlin and is represented by Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul and London, as well as Kamel Mennour, Paris.