Rob Wynne

Courtesy of the Artist and GAVLAK Palm Beach

American sculptor and installation artist Rob Wynne tests the boundaries of genres in his delicately crafted mixed-media works centered around language, textiles, printmaking, and—most iconically—poured glass. Fundamentally concerned with breaking rules, Wynne eschews traditional techniques like glassblowing, and instead demonstrates the medium’s malleability by hand-pouring short phrases that are as exquisite as they are absurd, or crafting unexpected objects like disembodied eyeballs affixed to a branch, blood puddles, mushrooms, and delicate, almost trompe l’oeil, spiderwebs that seem to shimmer in sunlight after the rain. Words and language are key throughout Wynne’s practice, whether embroidered over images, formed of glass, or painted onto objects to alter meaning and suggest narratives. One Embroidered Painting, for example, features the open-ended phrase, “come back” over a Rococo image that he has simultaneously sent-up and complicated—hinting that the serious and the playful may be shades of the same thing.