Andrea Robbins & Max Becher

Andrea Robbins and Max Becher create photo-based conceptual artwork that deals with what the artists have termed “transportation of place,” or scenes from one locale that resemble another place entirely. For their series Venice, Las Vegas, they photographed the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, often obscuring the hotel’s modern elements so as to confuse the viewer’s sense of place. The photographers also demonstrate a continuing interest in the politics and visuals of modern Cuba. In Wall Street in Cuba, for example, the duo captured images of stately Havana buildings, which, oddly enough, look more like those of Manhattan's Financial District than a Caribbean capital. In their work, the two have also used the Cuban cigar as a symbol of world politics, produced by a communist nation to feed the desires of the wealthy elsewhere.

Robbins was born in 1963 in Boston, and Becher was born in 1964 in Düsseldorf, Germany. The two met while studying for a BFA at Cooper Union, both graduating in 1986. Robbins then attended Hunter College in New York City for her MFA, and Max received his MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. In 1988, the two were married. Their work can be found in the collections of institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, the Jewish Museum in New York, the New School of Social Research in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Their work has been published and exhibited internationally. They are represented by Sonnabend Gallery in New York.