OPENING: Chris Robb "LOVE POEM" Art in the Chambers Exhibition

Please join us at 5:30pm on Monday, October 17, 2022

Orange County Mayor Jerry L. Demings, Orange County Arts & Cultural Affairs in partnership with the Public Art Review Board invite you to the Opening Event featuring the work of Chris Robb's GRIDS series, an expansive and expressive tapestry of personal history. Please join us at 5:30pm on Monday, October 17, 2022 at the Orange County Administration Center.

The Opening Event will be immediately followed by the Orange County Diwali: The Festival of Lights Celebration 2022.

‘Love Poem’

An installation of works from the GRIDS series.

GRIDS is a visual inventory representing 40 years of painting, drawing, printmaking, stenciling, mark making, gesture, and ideas.

The work shown features 8 wood panels, each 4 feet by 4 feet, and 2 panels, 5 feet by 4 feet. These panels are divided up into 12-inch squares, each square being its own artwork, and a part of the whole. A metaphor for an individual in today’s society. Everyone wishes to stand out as an individual, yet must realize that we are all part of a greater whole.

Love Poem is the name stenciled onto one of the GRIDS. I see most paintings as a love poem to the world, as being both a big world embracing an idea, and an intimate connection between two individuals.

Chris Robb was born in Berea, Ohio to an art teacher mother and Scottish immigrant father, Chris Robb has lived in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and now works and resides in Winter Park, Florida where he grew up.

Chris graduated from the University of Central Florida in the spring of 1980 and immediately moved to the vibrant 80’s art scene of the Lower East Side of New York. The first shows he participated in were group shows at the iconic Club 57 that also included work from Keith Haring, who curated the shows, Jean Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf and many others.

While in New York Chris also secured a grant from the Committee for the Visual Arts and had his first gallery show at PS 122 the well-known art and performance venue on the Lower East Side.

Robb’s paintings deal with ideas of culture, identity, memory, family, impermanence and interconnectedness. Informed by eastern thinking and a strong belief in a simple straightforward intuitive gesture his work is intensely personal and immediate. The paintings realize a glimpse of the artist working to find enduring values in an increasingly disposable society.

The exhibit will be on display in the Orange County Administration Center (201 S. Rosalind Avenue, Orlando, FL 32801) in the Board of County Commissioners Chambers Gallery until Friday, January 26, 2023 when the chambers are not in use.

Please contact Dawn.Knight@ocfl.net for more information.