Rob Wynne

Locks Gallery is excited to present THENCE, an exhibition of new and old works by New York-based artist Rob Wynne. This exhibition pairs recent poured glass wall sculptures with earlier works in various media with repeating themes throughout the past two decades of the artist’s career.

Wynne’s glass and mixed media works feature poetic and theatrical words and phrases which generate new meanings in unexpected ways. Drawn from poems, conversations, and the artist’s diary entries, texts are often rendered humorous and playful, inviting the viewer to reconsider literal interpretations of language. In his glass pieces, the scale of letters are aggrandized and contracted, accentuating their drama and altering their meaning. Similarly, his paintings and mixed media works incorporate baroque and romantic imagery, rendering the beautiful as humorous and even surreal. As put by critic Michael Duncan, “Wynne strips away the identities of the texts and images he appropriates. Free from the baggage, he uses his appropriations as revealing koans to praise and challenge the glories and mysteries of art.”

Since the 1990’s, Rob Wynne has created his signature glass wall reliefs composed of individual hand poured, mirrored glass elements. “A ladle of molten glass slipped out of my hand and spilled onto the floor, making a huge splat … it was a kind of cosmic explosion … that led me to realize I that I could actually control it and start making actual letters out of it,” recalled the artist. Each glass piece is made in a labor-intensive, multi-step process of blowing, pouring, and cooling. The resulting glimmering, seductive, irregularly shaped compositions suggest a personal touch that is absent in other text works such as those by Jenny Holzer or Barbara Kruger. Both in materiality and subject matter, Wynne’s glass and mixed media works demonstrate his mastery of contradiction.

Rob Wynne (b. 1948) is an American sculptor and installation artist who has exhibited throughout the US and abroad, with solo gallery exhibitions in Paris, Geneva, and New York. His work has been featured in exhibitions at the McNay Art Museum, TX; P.S.1 Institute for Contemporary Art, NY; Long Beach Museum of Art, CA; The Drawing Center, NY; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. Wynne's work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Centre Pompidou, France; The Norton Museum of Art, FL; the Columbus Museum of Art, OH; and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris. He lives and works in New York City.