Office Baroque is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of Robin Graubard at our midtown gallery on Ravensteinstraat 44 Rue Ravenstein. This will be the artist’s first individual exhibition in Europe.
1963 – I was at a James Bond movie with my 10 year old sister 12 years old and sitting in back of someone who reeked of strong perfume. I kept turning around to get some air to two young tough girls who thought I was looking at them. One of them said “hey why don’t you take a picture it lasts longer.” I was trapped. We quietly watched 007 in “From Russia with Love”.
Robin Graubard’s work, over the past 40 years, has explored and blurred the boundaries between documentary and autobiographical narratives. In the 1980s, Graubard documented aspects of the Lower East Side punk scenes and the nocturnal hustle of a then still dangerous Times Square but also travelled to Eastern Europe, Jamaica and Hawai. Travelling both East and West on a political and poetical map, Graubard occupies a hard-to-define position in relation to her subjects. There remains a sense of the unresolved at play in both life and in art, a nagging sense that something is always occluded and remains unsaid. Her work builds drama through mixing up distant and conflicting realities and chronologies — the most recent images in the exhibition were made on a recent trip to Cuba and Los Angeles, the oldest photograph in the exhibition dates back to 1978 when Graubard had just quit working for rock and roll and literary agents.
Robin Graubard was born in 1951 and lives and works in New York, USA. She studied film and dance and received a BFA in 1977 from NYU Film School. She has shown her work previously in solo exhibitions at JTT, New York; White Columns, New York and Anthology Film Archives, New York. Group shows include White Columns, New York; Participant Inc., New York and Photographic Research Center, Boston. She has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes. Her photographs have been published in The New York Times, Paris Match, The Guardian, Time, Newsweek, Der Spiegel, Die Welt and others.
