Exhibition Review: Deborah Robert: I'm
Deborah Roberts, The duty of disobedience, 2020. Mixed media collage on canvas. 72 x 100 inches. Artwork © Deborah Roberts. Courtesy the artist; Vielmetter Los Angeles; and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Image courtesy The Contemporary Austin. Photograph by Paul Bardagjy
Deborah Roberts’ solo debut has been a long time coming and the wait has not been in vain. Curtailed by the pandemic, her show, which was originally scheduled for September 2020 at The Contemporary Austin, is finally going up this week. The title is “I’m,” a reference, perhaps, to that early practice using photographs of herself as a young girl and its heavy focus on the theme of identity as well as beauty standards and the experience of living in society while black. Roberts’ work is seamlessly polemical and autobiographical, incorporating historic and family photographs in her powerful multimedia collages. Having worked for years on a long and, until now, underappreciated passion-career, Ms. Roberts is finally getting her due, drawing critical acclaim and acquisitions of her work from celebrities including Beyoncé and Former-President Barack Obama.
Deborah Roberts, Fighting all the ISM, 2019. Mixed media collage on canvas. 72 x 60 inches. Artwork © Deborah Roberts. Courtesy the artist; Vielmetter Los Angeles; and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Image courtesy The Contemporary Austin. Photograph by Paul Bardagjy.
Deborah Roberts, Portraits: When they look back (No. 3), 2020. Mixed media collage on canvas. 45 x 35 inches. Artwork © Deborah Roberts. Courtesy the artist; Vielmetter Los Angeles; and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Image courtesy The Contemporary Austin. Photograph by Paul Bardagjy.
Roberts combines bold gesture and utilitarian repetition with meticulous attention to detail, as in her piece “Fighting All the ISM,” where the nearly photorealistic shading of the wrinkles and seams of a girl’s jeans runs up against the brightly striped printed paper of her blouse as she extends her hands towards us, holding her space, standing her ground. The magic of Roberts’ faces is the way they seem to react and shift the longer you look at them—they contain multitudes of selves, each composite visage a short film compressed into a single frame. To read her subjects’ palms is to find a text almost as expressive as their faces which tells of the artist’s eloquence and imparts a compelling genuineness to her subjects. In “Portraits: When they look back (No. 3),” the subtle floral print of the two girls’ matching shirts fade into the background, faintly outlined by a green pinstripe, while their golden painted fingernails blaze from the canvas along with their faces. There is so much to take in—such detail in the understated piece—evocative of an old-fashioned family portrait—which grows with each second you study it. Like the title promises, the portrait indeed looks back—the inescapable eyes of the subjects gaze at once off into the middle distance and straight at the viewer.
A beautiful study of gestures, “Political Lambs in a Wolf’s World” brims with meaning and likewise compels the viewer to look, as I did, for minutes on end. Two girls with identical photo-collaged faces stand side by side with their left hands raised, waving, or, more likely, being sworn in to testify. We might assume them to be, as indexed by the police booking numbers (which some might recognize as being clipped from the iconic 1955 mugshot of Rosa Parks), the defendants. Hands, here, speak volumes. Parks’, holding the corners of the placard by the tips of her fingers rather than have it hung around her neck, show, even in their isolated state, dignity and reserved disdain. These girls, though, are frightened children, struggling under the weight of the all too adult burden foisted upon them.
Deborah Roberts, Jamal, 2020. Mixed media collage on canvas. 65 x 45 inches. Artwork © Deborah Roberts. Courtesy the artist; Vielmetter Los Angeles; and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Image courtesy The Contemporary Austin. Photograph by Paul Bardagjy.
Other pieces are eye-catchingly colorful, incorporating rich, brightly painted textures. The fractured, cubist faces of Roberts’ subjects speak to misrecognition and unrecognition, skewed perception and fraught self-identification, but ultimately affirm her subjects’ beauty in all its struggle and uncertainty, through the chilling pain and injustice that some of the pieces address. Roberts’ work, which combines faint traces of the “Norman Rockwell” quality that she attributes to her earlier work (in its warmth and relatability) with a crisp constructivist edge, is never without a difficult message or a briskly beating heart.
