Robert Cottingham – American Hi Fi

Description

Robert Cottingham, American Hi Fi 2009 is a Screenprint in colors on 290 gram archival Coventry paper with full margins. This print is from the “American Signs Portfolio”. From the signed, titled, numbered and dated printer’s proof edition of 10, aside from the edition of 100. Robert Cottingham is known as a photorealist, but his meticulous paintings and drawings of pre-digital Americana border on abstraction.

Robert Cottingham, American Hi Fi depicts mid-20-century signs, typefaces, manual cameras, railroad boxcars, and mechanical components, or what he has called “tools of the Everyman,” in various dynamic compositions with intensified color and light. The artist has described his fascination with signs as originating from trips to Times Square as a child: “I think that’s when the seed was planted, when I saw the kind of activity going on above the ground level.” Obsessed with the precise geometry of his subjects, Cottingham’s process incorporates a series of steps that can include sketches, photographs, shapes mapped onto grids, and model construction. His crisp, often-monumental canvases celebrate and accentuate the forms of his subjects while remaining devoid of nostalgia. He lists Franz Kline, Edward Hopper, and the New Realists among his influences.

Robert Cottingham is an American painter best known for his Photorealist depictions of cropped commercial signage. Born on September 26, 1935 in Brooklyn, NY, Cottingham studied at Pratt Institute, where he received his BFA in 1963 before starting a five-year career in commercial advertising. Upon moving to Los Angeles Cottingham seriously committed himself to his own painting practice, which eventually subsumed his advertising career by 1968 as the artist rose to prominence along with the Photorealist movement. Notably—though Cottingham is considered among the 13 most prominent Photorealists of the latter half of the 20th century—he disavowed his relationship to the movement. Instead, he views his own work as part of the lineage of vernacular Americana painters. His work can be found among the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., among others.

Robert Cottingham, American Hi Fi

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