Robert Sumner

Lives and works in Portland, OR, USA

Artist statement

The throughline of my work over the years – regardless of the source of inspiration for a particular piece – has been exploring the place of humans in the world. As a closeted queer youth growing up in a religious, conservative, heteronormative community questions about my relationship with that community, with the broader family of humankind, and with the larger world and its living creatures became foundational to how I experience life. This throughline could be explored artistically in many forms, but for me I’ve always been fascinated with the ambiguous zone on the spectrum between abstraction and representation. I have artistic heroes on both ends of that spectrum (Suzan Frecon/Bryce Marden or Philip Guston/Katherine Bernhardt), but there is something about abstraction that hints at representation that I find most intriguing. Although it is possible to build a critical and intellectual scaffolding around this preference for ambiguous abstraction from the enormous volume of words that have been printed over the past 50-plus years trying to make sense of art and the world after the fall of Modernism (I find Gianni Vattimo’s arguments in The End of Modernity to be the most compelling), my affinity for this space is visceral and instinctive and may simply go back to me laying on my back on the grass on summer days years ago looking for animals, people, monsters, and fantastic landscapes in the billowy white clouds drifting overhead.

Artwork