Notes

The present lot is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity. 

Robin Rhode first achieved international notice when documentation of his early live performances appeared in the lauded group exhibition How Latitudes Become Forms (2003) at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN, USA. Performance remains integral to his practice, but it is now mediated through photography and video. In his photographic series, Rhode documents a single protagonist – typically a child or adolescent – interacting with murals rendered using soap, charcoal, chalk, or paint. The protagonist’s interaction frequently influences the form of the mural, as in this lot where the girl in white’s skipping overwrites the wall texts with an abstract pattern of Rhode’s design.

Most of Rhode’s performances are enacted in front of public walls in Johannesburg and Berlin, where he relocated in 2002. The quotidian and surreal expression recorded in his condensed narratives is often framed by broader socio-economic concerns. One of Rhode’s most used sets historically was a wall in Westbury, a Johannesburg neighbourhood plagued by gang violence. Threats of violence and urban decay have provisionally seen him give up working at this site. The present lot forms part of a body of work made in Jericho. Rhode first visited this Palestinian city in the West Bank in 2014 and made his first photographic works in 2018.

Rhode was attracted to Jericho for its political and topographical similarities to South Africa. The biblical story of the demolition of Jericho’s walls also motivated his decision to work in the city. He has described Jericho as a spiritually charged space linked to narratives central to three faiths. The artist elaborates: “I wanted to work in a world where it was charged with narrative: a narrative that is spiritual, that is part mythological, that is part fictional, that is part archaeological.”¹

^1. Trevor Bishai (2021) “Conversation with Robin Rhode and Trevor Bishai”, Musée Magazine, 9 June: https://museemagazine.com/features/2021/6/9/a-conversation-with-robin-rhode-and-trevor-bishai

 

Born in 1976 in Cape Town, Robin Rhode received a BFA from Technikon Witwatersrand (now the University of Johannesburg) in 1998 and graduated in 2000 from the South African School of Film, Television, and Dramatic Art in Johannesburg. In 1997, Rhodes started making performative drawings on public walls using charcoal, chalk, paint, etc. and soon began photographing and filming these pieces. His works, which are a marriage of street art and performance – and the documentation thereof, are a commentary on socio-cultural issues such as identity, race, violence, and politics. Rhode lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

His awards and residencies include the Zurich Art Prize (2018); Roy R Neuberger Exhibition Prize, New York, USA (2014); Illy Prize at Art Brussels (2007); Walker Art Center residency (2003); Karl Hofer Gesellschaft residency (2001); and South African National Gallery residency (2000). In addition to exhibiting extensively in major exhibitions across the world, his work is part of many prominent collections including the Smithsonian Institute (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden) in Washington, DC, USA; Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessey, Paris, France; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY, USA; South African National Gallery, Cape Town; The Museum of Modern Art, NY, USA; and Centre Pompidou, Paris, France.