Robert Cumming

Large Prints, A Selection

ROBERT CUMMING
LARGE PRINTS, A Selection

June 2 – July 16

Press Release

Gallery Luisotti and Royale Projects are pleased to present their collaboration with The Robert Cumming Archive on the exhibition, Robert Cumming: Large Prints. This is the first solo gallery exhibition in over ten years to feature Cumming’s fabricated photography from the 1970s and the first time this work has been seen reinterpreted at a large scale. 

Cumming, who passed away in December of 2021, spent almost two years toward the end of his life supervising the enlargements of his 1970s photo-based work. Many negatives were scanned and proofed using his original artist’s prints as guides. The result is a curated selection of works by the artist that displays his devotion to the medium in the service of visual puns and precisionist wit. This exhibition serves as an introduction to this new iteration of Cumming’s most important work. 

From today’s perspective, Cumming and many of his contemporaries—John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, Eleanor Antin, and Cumming’s former roommate and friend, William Wegman—define what was once indefinable: conceptual photography. Compared to the trenches of the 1970s New York art scene, Southern California had refreshing neutrality, with plenty of room to experiment and an eccentric culture infused by Hollywood fantasy and perpetual good weather. Yet Cumming’s rigorous approach to photographic conceptualism set him apart.

Saws’ Ascent/Stumps Drop, 1978/2020
Archival pigment print
20 x 25 inches

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Chair Trick, 1973/2020
Archival Pigment Print
40 x 50 inches

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“Robert Cumming–the painter, printmaker, drawer, mail artist, sculptor, and photographer–has always devoted his art to exploration and experimentation, leading the viewer down a garden path that leads not to deception but to discovery. Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana…There is always time for meandering within the object-vocabulary of Cumming’s work.”

—Sarah Bay Gachot, Robert Cumming Draws on the Blackboard: The 1970’s Photographs 

Trick Shot, 1973/2020
Archival Pigment Print
40 x 50 inches

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67- Degree Body Arc Off Circle Center, 1975/2020
Archival Pigment Print
60 x 80 inches

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“You will find yourself inside the brain of an artist acutely aware of–and curious about–the fact that you will never actually get there. This paradoxical conundrum is at the core of this selection of photographs. His tireless, relentless, unpacking of objects and their meanings takes shape in a form of benevolence where misunderstanding is enlightenment and the visual associations are your own.”

—Sarah Bay Gachot, Robert Cumming Draws on the Blackboard: The 1970’s Photographs 

Of 8 Balls Dropped On The Peak Of The Roof, 2 Fell To The North, 6 Fell To The East, 1974/2020, Diptych
Archival Pigment Prints
Each print 20 x 25 inches

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View the full exhibition here.

Robert Cumming was born in 1943 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and died December 16, 2021, in Desert Hot Springs, California. His work has been widely exhibited internationally. The most recent museum survey of his photography, Robert Cumming: The Secret Life of Objects, opened at the George Eastman Museum and traveled to the California Museum of Photography, UC Riverside in 2019–2020. Other solo exhibitions include Cone of Vision, traveled to Australia and the United States to MFA, Boston, the CAM, Houston, and the MCA, San Diego, as well as over seventy additional solo shows, including Robert Cumming: Intuitive Inventions (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1988), Mechanical Illusions by Robert Cumming (Whitey Museum of American Art, 1986), and The Clutter of Happenstance (MoMA, New York, 1998). Group shows include Mirrors and Windows (MoMA, New York, 1978–1982), Fabricated to be Photographed (SFMOMA, 1979), State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970 (Orange County Museum of Art, 2012), and Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974 -1981 (MOCA, Los Angeles, 2012). He received three National Endowment for the Arts Grants (1972, 1975, 1979) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1981). Cumming’s archive will be placed at Stanford University, CA.

For more information about the artist and the exhibition, or for the artist’s complete curriculum vitae, please contact either Gallery Luisotti at (310) 600-1277 and by email at info@galleryluisotti.com or Royale Projects at (213)595-5182 and by email at appointment@royaleprojects.com. 

All Images © The Robert Cumming Archive, LLC