New York based David Shrobe creates multi-layered portraits and assemblage paintings made in part from everyday materials that he finds in multiple geographies. He disassembles furniture, especially from around his familial home in Harlem, separating wood from fabric and recombines them as supports for collage, painting, and drawing. What manifests are figures assembled by signaled body parts. Fragments depict each figure to offer an uncanny outline that exerts a presence of being. Traversing different approaches, his work brings notions of identity, history, and memory into question while challenging conventions of classical portraiture. Shrobe produces new narratives, fragmented and nonlinear, that feel intimate and personal without being anchored to a specific time or place.  

 

David Shrobe (b.1974, New York, NY) lives and works in New York. He holds an MFA and a BFA in Painting from Hunter College. Shrobe’s work was currently included in The Slipstream: Reflection, Resilience, and Resistance in the Art of Our Time at the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, and in Lineages: Works from the Collection at NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, FL. Shrobe has had recent solo exhibitions at Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York, NY; and Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco, CA. He has participated in group exhibitions at CFHILL Art Space, Stockholm, Sweden; Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Los Angeles, CA and New York, NY; Mandeville Gallery at Union College, Schenectady, NY; the Bronx Museum, Bronx, NY; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY. Shrobe’s work is held in the Permanent Collections of The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; The Block Museum, Evanston, IL; Union College, Schenectady, NY; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, Eugene, OR; NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale; The University of Arizona Museum of Art; University of Chicago, Booth School of Business Collection; and Pierce & Hill Harper Arts Foundation, Detroit.