Artist Tony Robbin Live at the Gilboa Museum

GILBOA—The Gilboa Museum is thrilled to announce a special guest lecture featuring groundbreaking Gilboa/New York artist and author, Tony Robbin at the Gilboa Museum & Juried History Center on Saturday, June 6, 1 PM.

As a founding member of the influential Pattern and Decoration (P&D) movement, Robbin has spent over five decades defying traditional artistic boundaries. His work seamlessly bridges the worlds of pure geometry, complex mathematics, and fine art. This event offers a rare opportunity to hear directly from the artist, who has created art in the Catskills from his studio in Gilboa for over three decades, about his career-long quest to celebrate patterns. 

Robbin burst onto the New York art scene with a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974. Rejecting the rigid, dry, and strictly primary-color constraints often associated with mid-century geometric art, Robbin was a founding member of the Pattern Painting movement out of a deep desire for "complexity, lyric color, and rich pattern."   

Over his prolific career including over 25 solo exhibits and 100 group exhibitions in 12 countries, Robbin has pushed the boundaries of how human beings conceptualize space. As noted in the catalogue of his comprehensive 2018 Retrospective, Robbin solved the challenge of depicting depth without relying on figurative elements such as "telephone poles and railroad tracks receding into the distance." Instead, he utilizes interwoven, superimposed patterns to present multiple dimensions within a single painting.

Robbin taught himself computer programming in the early 1980s to write sophisticated visualization software to incorporate into his painting. Robbin holds a U.S. patent for applying quasicrystal geometry to architecture, creating large-scale structural sculptures in Denmark and Jacksonville, Florida. In addition to his visual art, Robbin is an accomplished author of four books, including Shadows of Reality: The Fourth Dimension in Relativity, Cubism, and Modern Thought (Yale University Press, 2006) and his autobiography, Mood Swings: A Painter's Life (2011). 

Robbin discusses the universality and the utility of patterns: all over the globe and all throughout human time, cultures make patterns. 

A brief Q&A session will follow the illustrated talk on Saturday, June 6 at 1 pm. Seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis. Admission is free; refreshments will be served. The museum is located at 122 Stryker Road, Gilboa, NY 12076.