Robert Russell

Art To See Now In LA: Russell, Nevelson, Fujita

Although a painterly investigation of the figurines, their surfaces, and how they refract light, Russell’s work is conceptual in nature, in that his works achieve greater meaning when we learn their context. —Tom Teicholz

Reclaiming the monstrous kitsch of Dachau

Transposed from a miniature scale to a monumental one, and from porcelain into paint, these subjects are alchemized from kitsch into art, like golems shaped from the clay of their dark history. —Juliana Halpert

Gallery Rounds: Robert Russell

The unsettling history of these objects and their manufacturing can’t be separated from the paintings and that is a critical aspect Russell’s intent: to fuse the beauty and the horror and to let the viewers come to terms with how they chose to interpret what they confront on the canvases. — Jody Zellen

Robert Russell’s Latest Exhibition Is Haunting Reminder of the Holocaust

Harmless, yet haunting, these paintings transform puppies and deer into memorials of genocide. — Shawn Ghassemitari

Robert Russell’s paintings illuminate the dark history of the slave laborers of Dachau

We know this about former Nazi Party leader Heinrich Himmler: He was a mass murderer. He was a key player in orchestrating the Holocaust — true evil, personified. Lesser known: Himmler was into bunnies. And puppies. And baby lambs. Specifically: cutesy, porcelain tchotchkes of such creatures. A new solo exhibition of work by painter Robert Russell shines a light on the dark history of these innocent objects. — Deborah Vankin

Artist depicts disarmingly beautiful Holocaust art

At first blush, the recent, photorealistic paintings of Los Angeles-based Jewish artist Robert Russell look inviting, almost sweet. But all is not well in these enormous pictures. —Jewish News Syndicate

Arist Spotlight | Robert Russell

With an interest in the role of photography in image-making, Robert Russell’s paintings explore concepts of identity, memory, desire, authenticity, and the entire history of painting. — Anna Schneider

Meet Robert Russell | Artist

"There is no amount of thinking that will produce an artwork. Great works come only from doing, not from thinking." —Robert Russell

Robert Russell: Painting as an Art of Faith

"From the very first mark on the canvas, the whole process of painting is a kind of meandering. There might be some ideas or hopes for the outcome but the process is the point. Painting is, for me, a practice, and if a picture emerges that’s good or, even more mysteriously, that someone wants to buy, then all the better!" —Robert Russell

Artist Robert Russell Discusses Memorializing Teacups in His Photorealistic Paintings

Russell is best known for his photorealist paintings, which address themes of memory, iconography, and mortality. His work often nods to art history and also reflects on the increasing importance that photography plays today. — Francesca Aton

Gallery Rounds: Robert Russell

Russell’s work is simultaneously rooted in painting and in conceptual art. He is invested in the ideas of reproduction, seriality, and transformation, as each of his projects presents variations on a theme. — Jody Zellen

Robert Russell | Concise Los Angeles Art Guide for February

Mysteriously set against deep black backgrounds, the larger-than-life teacups are carefully rendered like individual portraits. Russell based his surprisingly moving images on photos found on eBay listings and online estate sales. — Matt Stromberg and Elisa Wouk Almino

“Teacups” An Exhibition by Robert Russell at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles

The paintings are marked by both a tenderness in their precision and subtle irony in rendering such delicate objects on a grand scale.

Must See: Robert Russell

Robert Russell’s work addresses ideas of memory, iconography, and mortality in a personal language that is attentive to beauty, the history of painting, and the role of photography.

Robert Russell at Anat Ebgi

Robert Russell’s Book Paintings at Anat Ebgi depict meticulously rendered artist monographs, which appear to weightlessly hover in empty, milky voids. —Jessica Simmons

Review: In Robert Russell’s ‘Book Paintings,’ what you see is not what you get

That’s what his paintings do beautifully: make viewers doubt our perceptions and question our assumptions so that we might see reality with fresh eyes — as an unwritten story in which fact and fiction intermingle, playfully and purposefully. —David Pagel

Meet an Artist Monday: Robert Russell

Robert Russell’s painting style is a kind of dreamy realism, wherein observation, experience, optical phenomenon and art history all blend into a seamless, fantastical critique of how we absorb and process information. —Shana Nys Dambrot

Book Paintings

Russell’s works weave together various lineages of art history and challenge ideas of authenticity.

Robert Russell Infusing Reproductions With New Life

It is a given that much art is experienced through reproduction and Russell calls attention to this fact by making paintings of books based on found copies of the original paintings. —Jody Zellen

Robert Russell: Moore. More. Moore.

His overt, even heavy-handed critique of contemporary society (especially the scourges of opioids, rancid politics, social media, and toxic celebrity culture) is enacted with a cheeky verve, in which humor manifests in story and style, though the message be cynical and dire such as befits our troubled times. —Shana Nys Dambrot

Review: Robert Russell examines potency of a name in the Google age

“Robert Russell” thus becomes a kind of cultural and historical phenomenon. But perhaps even more interesting is what the project reveals about a relatively new reality — the availability of millions of indexed digital images. —Sharon Mizota

Five Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week, From Tap Dancing to Ruined Billboards

Painter Robert Russell did a Google image search for Robert Russell and, unsurprisingly, found a range of strange, striking and stereotypical-looking men. He painted a number of them, doing so fastidiously on linen stretched over medium-sized frames. —Catherine Wagley

“Robert Russell : Masters”

In this body of work Russell acknowledges the educating role of books specific to the context of the visual arts, that it is through reproductions that most people experience many touchstone artists and their works. —Jody Zellen

Robert Russell: Anna Helwing Gallery

The sense that every cute baby picture is in danger of morphing, over time, into a sordid mug shot or a scene from Girls Gone Wild is very much part of our informational moment—Russell only needs to nod in that direction. More surprising is the way he manages to conjure in paint the sense that the image is a vague, swirling substance that is, at the same time, always hardening into something more or less irrevocable. —Jan Tumlir

Robert Russell: Scattershot

Amid this sinister carnival of images, the sustained intelligence of Russell’s inquiry into the nature of representation is the only constant. —Christopher Bedford

Bacon, pork and just plain piggy

History painting, the genre Russell evokes in a cockeyed way, is always more revealing of present than past. So it is with "Pink," a painting-installation whose Pepto-Bismol hues italicize today's pervasive sense of nausea. —Christopher Knight

Robert Russell Arist Conversation

April 2023

Robert Russell: Teacups

February 2021