Looking in the Rearview Mirror at the Career of Robin Ross

Point Gallery curators Frank Martinez and Michael Vacchiano had planned to do a show featuring recent work by artist Robin Ross, who built her career in Brooklyn but moved to Crestone, Colorado, about four years ago. Sadly, Ross passed away while the show was still in the planning stages. So...

By Michael Paglia

October 20, 2015

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Point Gallery curators Frank Martinez and Michael Vacchiano had planned to do a show featuring recent work by artist Robin Ross, who built her career in Brooklyn but moved to Crestone, Colorado, about four years ago. Sadly, Ross passed away while the show was still in the planning stages. So Martinez and Vacchiano subsequently decided to expand the idea for the exhibit, and instead of putting on the small solo they originally envisioned, they've dedicated the entire set of spaces in their enormous gallery to Ross's work from the past fifteen years.

The handsome survey is titled Robin Ross: Graced Momentum: A Retrospective. The show is not hung chronologically, which is too bad, because viewers will need to pay attention to the wall copy in order to know when something was done. But in general, Ross's stylistic arc goes from abstracted figures in the ’90s to completely abstract color fields a couple of years ago. Her most recent works, done when she was confined to a wheelchair, are altered books: Ross marked pages of old books with paint so that the resulting compositions become sequential images as the pages are flipped.
Robin Ross runs through November 4 at Point Gallery, 765 Santa Fe Drive. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday; for more information call 720-254-0467 or go to pointgallerydenver.com.

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Michael Paglia is an art historian and writer whose columns have appeared in Westword since 1995; his essays on the visual arts have also been published in national periodicals including Art News, Architecture, Art Ltd., Modernism, Art & Auction and Sculpture Magazine. He taught art history at the University of Colorado Denver.

Contact: Michael Paglia