Rob Mango: An Avatar Incarnates: An Artist's Journey In New York City And Beyond

Mango’s diverse body of work, depicted here, includes vividly imagined, surreal meditations on the artist in the city and abroad, animated by figures from his personal mythology. Drawings, assemblages, sculptures, paintings, and groundbreaking painted-sculptural hybrid works, from 1975–2014, represent Mango’s entire life as an artist, including stints in the Midwest, New Mexico, Paris, Prague, Venice, and Tuscany. Featured in this retrospective are a series of epic, large-scale paintings set in a fantastic New York, replete with the city’s iconic architectural landmarks, but populated by gods, warriors, shamans, and other figures drawn from many epochs and cultures. Also here are portraits of the famous and infamous, pastoral scenes from a rural Tuscan village, and Mango’s breathtaking series of nudes.

Rob Mango is a painter who draws upon his autobiograpy and the recent history of New York to create a poetic vision of the life of the artist and his struggle for self-realization. His allegorical paintings have a nocturnal, dream-like intensity, and in the words of critic Robert Mahoney, together form, "one great piece of visual music," that ranges from "glory to terror, from euphoria to horror, from exaltation to humiliation."

-100 Paintings: An Artist's Life in New York City

“Throughout my artist-in-residency, I insisted on relative accuracy in my drawings. When drawing on location, there is a kind of inflow of information that an artist’s mind sorts through-accepting, rejecting and prioritizing all that meets the eye. I wanted those drawings to be relied on as fundamentally accurate account of the place itself, yet also expressive. I found myself wading into the process with a joy derived from encountering a subject completely new to me, but as old as western civilization itself…I noticed that, strangely, my intellect was being dealt out of the process, and an unfamiliar spirit was moving within me, taking control. I was concentrating well, focusing on the color, shape and texture of each rock, each stone located by an Etruscan hand 2,500 or more years ago. Anima was beginning to seize my very being.”

-Rob Mango

“The depiction of women as objects, specifically as morphed and manipulated forms, has generated some criticism of an unwelcome nature. Yet for Mango he considers it a return to dedicating himself not only to a matter of form, to art historical eras and figures such as Pablo Picasso and Willem De Kooning, whose work informed his own, and in adding to the sum total of what he can create. Yet I feel that Mango goes beyond all these things. He creates a contemporary manifestation about an idealized subject, adds a contemporary form and materials, and in the end the theme is not only the subject, but the attitude to which the work itself contributes. It becomes a form of self-affirmation… Mango takes nothing away from the woman as a figure because he invests her with an interior life which we cannot doubt. Her beauty is a combination of body, soul, and the world that swirls around her, making a locus of intense personal energies.”

-David Gibson

“Strong Jester was the last known version of the jester that looms large within the known pantheon of Mango’s preferred symbols. He paints him as a modern strong man, a stern countenance matched by his rippling muscles and the heroic stance he takes with his paint brushes, coloring a roll of cloth to match the rainbow of his crown, as if illustrating the dimension from which he first emerged, and the world he must inhabit to remain a potent presence: celebrating joy while challenging authority. He shows how he has grown strong, with the power to survive oblivion.”

-David Gibson