Front Room: Jason Roberts Dobrin
12 May – 30 June, 2023
Exhibition
Jason Roberts Dobrin
May 12 - June 30, 2023
Opening Friday, May 12, 6-8pm
SBG is pleased to present Jason Roberts Dobrin for our first programmed exhibition in our street-facing Front Room. The show features new still-life paintings in the artist’s heavily impasto style.
Dobrin’s practice is primarily focused on representational painting which prioritizes straightforward subject matter and the interaction of gestural techniques with varying materials. Marked by layering lush, textured paint on canvas, Dobrin creates sculptural works that foreground saturated color and broad brushstrokes, rendering a tactile quality.
His still life paintings feature an array of commonplace items in familiar settings, from flowers in vases, lit cigarettes which billow across the canvas, and fruit in vessels, all inspired by the domestic spaces and exterior places which occupy Dobrin’s memories and direct environs. Concerned with an obsessive preoccupation with the banal, the iconography depicted is deliberately familiar, yet when paired with improvisational brushwork creates an image which is at times obscured. The individual subjects are simple and the truths unapparent, but unified they become a clear vision of our increasingly generic screen-based culture through a coded prose that acknowledges the waning functionality of the image.
Artist Bio
Jason Roberts Dobrin was born in Berkeley, California and received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005, and his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2013. He has had solo exhibitions in Cirrus Gallery, LA; Granada Show Room, LA; There There, LA; and the Project Space at AF Projects/Louise Alexander Gallery, LA. His work has been featured in multiple group exhibitions, including the Night Gallery, LA; Stanley’s Gallery, LA; The Crying Clover, LA; Dan Graham Gallery, LA; Marfa Ballroom, Texas; Mud Guts Gallery, NY; and the Oakland Museum, CA. He has given artist talks at Art Center, CA; CalArts, CA; Armory Center for the Arts, CA; and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, CA.