Robert Bordo is a New York-based, Canadian-American artist known for paintings that blend modernist formal concerns with postmodern approaches to image, subject matter and metaphor.Pardee, Hearne. "Robert Bordo," Arts, September 1989.Hanna, Deirdre. "Bordo's Unconventional Landscapes Map Potential for Cultural Change," Now Magazine, (Toronto), February 28, 1991.Sam, Sherman. "500 Words: Robert Bordo," Artforum, March 3, 2013. Retrieved February 16, 2022. Throughout his career, he has worked in painting series positioned between representation and abstraction that critics characterize as conceptually structured, yet sensual in execution.Eleey, Peter. "Robert Bordo," Frieze, June 7, 2002. Retrieved February 17, 2022.Maine, Stephen. "Robert Bordo at Alexander and Bonin," Art in America, February 2006, p. 131–2.Cohen, David. "Robert Bordo: it’s always raining at Alexander and Bonin," artcritical, September 22, 2008. Retrieved February 17, 2022.Deitcher, David. "Robert Bordo at Alexander and Bonin," Texte Zur Kunst, June 1999. These series explore recurring, often overlapping themes, such as memory and experience, the passage of time, landscape and weather phenomena, mapping, and mark-making as an indicator of thought.Glueck, Grace. "Robert Bordo: New Paintings,"The New York Times, April 16, 1999, p. E35. Retrieved February 17, 2022.Schwabsky, Barry. "Robert Bordo," Artforum, June 2012. Retrieved February 17, 2022.Heinrich, Will. "What to See in New York Art Galleries This Week – Robert Bordo," The New York Times, May 18, 2017., p. C17 Retrieved February 16, 2022.Jones, Nicholas John. "6 December," Nordic Art Review – Kunstkritikk, December 6, 2019. Retrieved February 16, 2022. New York Times critic Roberta Smith described Bordo's early map paintings as charting an idiosyncratic "hybrid discipline … a kind of cartographically conscious rerouting of modernism";Smith, Roberta. "Robert Bordo," The New York Times, April 7, 1989, p. C22. Retrieved February 16, 2022. in a 2019 New Yorker review of his "crackup" paintings, Andrea Scott wrote, "Bordo's imagery is an apt metaphor for our current, contentious political climate, but his true subject is painting itself: how easily it can tip realism into abstraction or shift figure-ground relations until it's impossible to discern whether you’re on the inside looking out or vice versa."Scott, Andrea. "Robert Bordo," The New Yorker, December 18, 2019. Retrieved February 16, 2022.
Bordo's work belongs to several public art collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art,The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Coast (Columbus), 1987, Robert Bordo, Art Collection. Retrieved February 21, 2022. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Robert Bordo, Artist. Retrieved February 21, 2022. and Hammer Museum. In 2007, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. "Robert Bordo," Fellows. Retrieved February 16, 2022. He has also received a Robert De Niro, Sr. Prize and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Canada Council, among other recognition.Chiaverina, John. "Robert Bordo Wins 2014 Robert De Niro Sr. Prize," ARTnews, December 3, 2014. Retrieved February 16, 2022.American Academy of Arts and Letters. Purchase Fund Award. Retrieved February 21, 2022.The Canada Council. "20th Annual Report 1976–7", 1977.
Education and early career Bordo was born in Montreal, Canada in 1949. He attended McGill University in Montreal from 1967 to 1970. He was dissatisfied at the time with the dominance of hard-edge abstraction in Montreal, and left to take up studies at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture with Philip Guston and Mercedes Matter, among others, from 1972 to 1974.DiBenedetto, Steve. "Robert Bordo in Conversation with Steve DiBenedetto," Turps Banana, Summer 2010, p. 14–28.
In 1977, Bordo moved into a loft in Hoboken, New Jersey that he shared with choreographer Mark Morris.Acocella, Joan. Mark Morris, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004. Retrieved February 21, 2022. He collaborated with Morris on several dance productions between 1983 and 1995, creating set designs, costumes and posters for works staged at Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music and Dance Theatre Workshop, among other venues.Kisselgoff, Anna. "Mark Morris Company," The New York Times, November 13, 1986, p. C25. Retrieved February 17, 2022.Dunning, Jennifer. "Sidestepping the Camp in a Work by Stein and Thomson," The New York Times, March 18, 2006, p. B12. Retrieved February 17, 2022. These works included The Death of Socrates (1983), the danced Purcell opera Dido and Aeneas (1989–2012),Kisselgoff, Anna. "Purcell’s 'Dido and Aeneas' As Mark Morris Sees It," The New York Times, June 9, 1989. Retrieved February 17, 2022. Stabat Mater (1986), and Paukenschlag (1993).Kisselgoff, Anna. "On Reckless Passion And Flying Bodies: Meditation in Motion," The New York Times, May 5, 1993, p. C15. Retrieved February 17, 2022. Dance critic Joan Acocella wrote that Bordo's "brooding" backdrop for Dido and Aeneas (derived from his abstracted map paintings of the time) "read [not] as fact, but as idea—a projection, of Aeneas’s [tragic] duty" and the vastness of the world and history compared to the individual.Acocella, Joan. "The Long Journey," The Opera Quarterly, Summer 2015, p. 182–5.
During the first decade of his art career, Bordo exhibited in solo shows at the New York Studio School and Concordia University (Montreal), group shows at the Jersey City Museum, Drawing Center and Tampa Museum of Art, and in collaborative projects with poet William Allen and the conceptual collective Group Material.Deitcher, David. Robert Bordo: Paintings 1989-1990, New York/Toronto: Brooke Alexander/Mira Godard Gallery, 1990.Jersey City Museum. Eight Painters: Jersey City Museum Invitational, Jersey City, NJ: Jersey City Museum, 1980.Allen, William. The Man on the Moon: Poems, New York: New York University Press, 1987. February 28, 2022. His first major solo exhibitions were held at Brooke Alexander Gallery in New York (1987–1992) and Mira Godard Gallery in Toronto (1991).Westfall, Stephen. "Robert Bordo at Brooke Alexander," Art in America, September 1988.Yau, John. "Robert Bordo's Current Address," Cover, April 1989.Cyphers, Peggy. "Robert Bordo," Arts, April 1991.Taylor, Kate. "Geographic Works in Realm of Politics," The Globe and Mail, March 1, 1991.Gopnick, Adam. "Robert Bordo," The New Yorker, November 1992. In 1995, he joined the faculty at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York, heading its painting program from 1996 to 2017.The Cooper Union. "Prof. Robert Bordo Receives 2014 De Niro Prize for Painting," News, December 5, 2014. Retrieved February 16, 2022.Bard College. / "Robert Bordo," People. Retrieved February 16, 2022. He became a faculty member of Bard College's MFA painting program in 2010. Bordo maintained studios in both the Hudson Valley in upstate New York and Brooklyn in the first two decades of the 2000s and now works from Kinderhook, New York.Modern Painters. "Jeans, Glasses, Faces, Asses" Robert Bordo in Conversation with Cecily Brown and Amy Sillman," September 2016, p. 68-71.Cameron, Seth. "Robert Bordo with Seth Cameron," The Brooklyn Rail, July–August 2016. Retrieved February 17, 2022.
Artwork and reception
Bordo's painting series are intuitive in their development, often originating from ruminations on banal images, objects or clichés, which give way to explorations of the space, vocabulary and material practice of painting.
Critics David Cohen and Stephen Maine have related Bordo's art to an American tradition of stylized abstraction from nature that includes Alex Katz and Milton Avery, while also linking him to critically self-aware contemporary painters such as Raoul De Keyser, Thomas Nozkowski, and Merlin James.Naves, Mario. "Ambiguous Landscapes," he New York Observer, October 10, 2005. Retrieved February 21, 2022.Cohen, David. "The Big Picture at Sikkema Jenkins & Co," artcritical, July 1, 2012. Retrieved February 17, 2022. Cohen distinguishes Bordo from both groups in his greater focus on "painterly experience" and the physical qualities of color, substance and application.
Bordo's earlier series were noted for lyrical qualities recalling Cézanne and the color-field painters Clyfford Still and Agnes Martin;Arning, Bill. "Robert Bordo," Time Out New York, April 1999.Jones, Alan. "Robert Bordo," Flash Art, March–April 1988. his later series feature a blunter, more anxious sensibility that writers compare to the late work of Philip Guston.Butler, Sharon. "Ode to Robert Bordo," Two Coats of Paint, October 2015. Retrieved February 17, 2022.Rhodes, David. "Robert Bordo Back Flip," The Brooklyn Rail, May, 2017. Retrieved February 16, 2022.
Early series (1988–1998) In his early work, Bordo sought to integrate an abstract painting language with subject matter and metaphors related to landscape, social narratives, modernism, and his personal history as a Canadian and Montrealer living in New York. He initially painted globes, before turning to two-dimensional landforms and graphic elements, most prominently in his "Map Paintings." His approach to imagery and form—as well as his suggestive titles—kept this work open to a range of political, historical and physical interpretations. Stephen Westfall described them as "homeless paintings" of drift and restlessness, of area but not place, grounded by concrete qualities of texture, surface and intimate scale. Other writers identified metaphors involving emigration, journey, change and loss,Cotter, Holland. "Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Bordo," The New York Times, December 20, 1996, p. C28. Retrieved February 17, 2022. or—citing their military, economic and geographic references—contemporary geopolitical commentary (e.g., Hidden Agenda, Thaw).
Bordo exhibited map paintings in six solo exhibitions between 1987 and 1996. In these modestly scaled, quasi-minimal canvasses, he rendered the abstract shapes and irregular contours of landmasses from globes in glazes and textured fragments of color, which hovered between topographical suggestions of land, water or sky and abstraction, augmented by camouflage patterns, frames and elements from airmail envelopes, barely visible ledgers and stenciled aircraft forms (e.g., Exile, Letter).Smith, Roberta. "Group Shows in SoHo for a Weekend of Gallery Hopping," The New York Times, January 15, 1993, p. C30. Retrieved February 16, 2022. Roberta Smith likened these works to "the infinite spaces" of Edward Ruscha and Vija Celmins and the fictional stamp paintings of Donald Evans.
Bordo's 1990s work also included his "Speech Bubble" and "Denim" paintings. The former works employ ghostly, hand-painted, empty speech bubbles set against monochrome white or gun-metal gray backgrounds—an iconic reference to speechlessness during the height of the AIDS crisis. The "Denim" works employ stenciled bootprints on blue monochromes and consider themes involving mapping, walking, cruising, and queering of the field of painting.
Postcard paintings and landscape abstractions