Artist Registry
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STATEMENT OF WORK
Andrew Robinson makes ceramics, sculpture, and prints from the materials of American forgetting. His work begins with portraits—faces found, appropriated, or remembered—which he then systematically destroys and rebuilds using clay, silkscreen, and mark-making that cuts through surface to reveal what lies beneath.
Robinson grew up queer in 1970s New Jersey, the son of an abstract painter and a Shakespearean actor. This biographical fact matters because his work operates as both archaeology and invention, digging through the sediment of a culture that has always been better at erasure than memory. His ceramic assemblages function like makeshift shrines, the kind that appear overnight on city streets—urgent, temporary, necessary.
In one recent series, Robinson worked with police surveillance footage from sting operations targeting gay men. He printed these images onto porcelain and paper, then layered them with clay fragments and gestural marks that obscure as much as they reveal. The men in these photographs become abstractions, their faces pushed to the edge of recognition. What remains is not portraiture but evidence—of presence, of resistance, of the gap between who we are and who we are allowed to be.
Robinson's technique mirrors his subject: the sgraffito cuts he makes through ceramic surfaces echo the violence of historical omission, while the layering of materials suggests the accretion of hidden lives. His work understands that some truths can only be approached obliquely, through fragments and shadows and the spaces between what we can see and what we know is there.
Like pentimento in old paintings, traces of the original portraits inevitably surface through Robinson's interventions. The work insists that erasure is never complete, that some essential nature will always break through. This is both the subject and the method of his art: making visible what was meant to disappear.