Tina Kim Gallery is pleased to present Marc Andre Robinson: You Are The Current / I Am the Wire. For his first solo exhibition with the gallery, Robinson will exhibit two sculptures alongside a grid of related drawings that function like an index or alphabet of form. In addition, the artist will create a site-specific vinyl wall-installation in the gallery’s foyer.

Best known for his vertiginous sculptures made from found and collaged wood furniture, Robinson’s work explores issues of race, politics, and aesthetic formalism all through an incisive eye and with a keen sense of humor. In addition to his sculpture, Robinson works with photographs, video, and drawings to frame slippery tableaus that frankly investigate the construct of race and cultural vernacular while simultaneously rejecting any reductive interpretation. This conceptual rigor and intellectual stubbornness underscore a larger conversation about art and artifact — a central concern to the artist and one that frames his interest in the freighted psychology of history and the study of semiotics.

Robinson’s practice weaves together strands of Dada and Minimalism with more conceptual and sociological themes of artists such as David Hammons and Bruce Nauman. His objects, especially the furniture sculptures, charge everyday domestic objects with a haunted aura of potentiality, as if they might represent an ancient ritual artifact or symbolic apparatus. This tension is accomplished through his spare and often raw use of materials, from oil to vinyl and weathered wood. As evidenced in Duchamp’s Readymades and Rauschenberg’s Combines, Robinson understands the power inherent in things and their potential to maintain not only memory but also cultural currency.

Born in 1971 in Los Angeles, Marc Andre Robinson received a MFA from the Maryland Institute of Art in 2002. He has participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program, and was an artist in residence at both the Lower Manhattan Cultural Center and The Studio Museum in Harlem. His work was featured prominently in the New Museum’s inaugural exhibition Unmonumental and has also been profiled in T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Additionally, he has been included in exhibitions at Artists Space, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow.

Robinson is the winner of a 2009 Art Matters Grant for artists focusing on communication and collaboration across national borders, which he will use to South Africa. Upcoming exhibitions include a solo project at the alternative space Basekamp in Philadephia as well as exhibitions at the Maryland Institute College of Art and at the Salamatina Gallery in Long Island.