David Shrobe

Provenance:  Courtesy of the Artist

New York based David Shrobe creates multi-layered portraits by repurposing everyday materials that he finds in multiple geographies but especially from his Harlem neighborhood. He disassembles furniture, separating wood from fabric and recombines them as supports for collage, painting, and drawing. In doing so, he excavates history to create work that brings notions of identity, community, and history into question while challenging conventions of classical portraiture. Shrobe produces new narratives, fragmented and nonlinear, that feel intimate and personal without being anchored to a specific time or place.

David Shrobe (b.1974, New York) lives and works in New York. He holds an MFA and a BFA in painting from Hunter College. He is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and was a Joan Mitchell Artist Teaching Fellow. His work was recently included in group shows, and PUNCH at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Los Angeles, and New York; Embody at Mandeville Gallery at Union College, New York; Bronx Calling: the Fourth AIM Biennial, at the Bronx Museum, and in Harlem Postcards at the Studio Museum in Harlem.  He has had solo exhibitions at Thierry Goldberg Gallery in New York; Jenkins Johnson Gallery in San Francisco, and The Sugar Hill Children’s Museum in New York, among others.  He has shown at numerous art fairs including EXPO Chicago, Untitled Miami Beach, and most recently, a solo booth at The Armory Show. Shrobe’s work is held in the Permanent Collections of The Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; The Block Museum, Evanston, Illinois; Union College, Schenectady, New York; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon; and NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale.