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Robert Russell (born 1971) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He completed his MFA at The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 2006. Russell earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Through the use of a frequently subdued color palette, Robert Russell’s representational paintings explore concepts of identity, memory, desire and authenticity. Often self-referential in nature, existential questions regarding the role of an image and the process of memory and imagination arise.
Themes include (among others) teacups, art books, portraits of Robert Russell that are not the artist, clouds, pigs, children and most recently paintings of Allach Porcelain figurines. His most recent exhibition at Anat Ebgi Gallery, featured new still life oil paintings of Judaica and pre-Nazi-era German porcelain.
Profile picture by Chad Unger.
Hi Robert! It’s a pleasure to sit down with you! First question that I always ask. How does a regular day look like for you in Los Angeles?
Robert: Thank you! A regular day starts very early. I like to get to the studio before the world wakes up. I usually work until the afternoon, then try to leave space for reading, looking, thinking, or walking.
I’m curious, growing up, what kind of kid were you? What did you enjoy doing, and how did you spend your time?
Robert: I was a sensitive and angry kid, always drawing. I spent countless hours drawing, skateboarding, playing baseball. Drawing gave me a language that felt truer than words and allowed me to quiet my mind.
Alright, so when did you start to paint, and when did you start taking being an artist seriously?
Robert: I started really painting as an undergrad, but it wasn’t until graduate school at CalArts that I really registered the stakes of being an artist—not just making things, but making meaning. That’s when it clicked that this wasn’t simply an escape, but a way of moving through the world.
Much of your work deals with memory and imagination. Do you see memory as something trustworthy or more like a creative act?
Robert: I think memory is a creative act. It’s not just a recording—it’s a reconstruction. My paintings often live in that in-between space: not documentation, but interpretation. I’m less interested in what happened than in how we remember what happened, and why.
Can you tell me about what led you to painting portraits of people named Robert Russell who are not yourself?
Robert: That series started as a kind of existential joke—a way of confronting identity by scattering and diluting it. Painting other Robert Russells became a study on the self as a construct: fluid, fragmented, refracted, internet generated. It also explored the absurdity of authorship in a time when names are searchable and selves are endlessly duplicated online.
How do you see the relationship between representation and authenticity in your work—especially in a time when images are endlessly replicated?
Robert: I don’t think authenticity comes from truth in representation. It comes from intention. My work embraces replication—whether it’s painting from a book cover or a found image from eBay or mass produced memorial candles. The copy becomes a form of care and attention.
What’s the personal or symbolic significance of teacups in your work?
Robert: The teacup is a domestic object, often feminized and overlooked. But it’s also fragile, and it holds something. In my paintings, it becomes a kind of stand-in for memory or grief and even death—something small that contains more than it seems. It’s a take on the tradition of Vanitas or Momento Mori — a nod to still life painting, and the quiet radicality of attention. I created these works during the COVID pandemic when our domestic lives took over and we couldn’t leave the house.
In your Book Paintings, you’re engaging with other artists through reproductions. How do you view authorship or legacy in those works?
Robert: Those paintings are love notes to the artists in my psychic canon. They’re also efforts to kind ov overcome the “Anxiety of Influence” as Harold Bloom put it. By painting the covers of monographs (that don’t actually exist), I’m not just replicating an image—I’m acknowledging the way their work entered my life. It’s a kind of devotional act, but also a look at how art survives: in books, in memory, in reinterpretation.
Your Allach series deals with objects steeped in Nazi history. How did that body of work emerge, and what emotional or ethical challenges came with it?
Robert: I came across an Allach figurines during my research of the history of porcelain—and was then horrified by its origin. Allach was a porcelain company run by the SS, using forced labor. I couldn’t look away. Painting them became a way to hold a contradiction: the seductive surface and the monstrous history. The challenge was to neither aestheticize nor neutralize—to let that discomfort remain visible.
With that in mind, You’ve spoken about reconnecting with your Jewish identity. How has that shaped your perspective—especially in the Allach series?
Robert: It’s deepened the stakes for me. I come from a family and a people marked by displacement and survival. Engaging with Jewish identity in my work is both a return and a reckoning. In the Allach series, painting these objects becomes a way to reclaim authorship—to assert agency where it was stripped away. It was a way to redeem and somehow repair a version of this grotesque narrative.
As a Jewish artist, how do you approach the act of “reclaiming” symbols or forms with painful origins?
Robert: Reclamation isn’t about erasure—it’s about context. I’m not trying to purify or redeem the original forms. I want to complicate them, to situate beauty and horror in a single object. It’s a way of saying that this happened, and we’re still here.
Your paintings are often beautiful on the surface, yet conceptually heavy. Is it intentional to seduce the viewer first, then confront them?
Robert: Yes, absolutely. I believe in the power of seduction—but also in its betrayal. I want the viewer to be drawn in, then unsettled. That tension between surface and depth, pleasure and pain, beauty and the grotesque is where I find meaning.
How do you balance aesthetic refinement with historical or emotional unease?
Robert: By slowing down. By paying attention. The refinement isn’t decoration—it’s a form of reverence. Even the most troubling subjects deserve care. That care becomes a way of dignifying memory.
Is there a painting you’ve made that you still think about—something unresolved or especially meaningful?
Robert: My first small painting of a yahrzeit candle that was in my last show, Stateless Objects at Anat Ebgi Gallery. It’s simple, almost blank. But for me, it holds the weight of absence. It’s not resolved—and maybe that’s the point.
Can you walk me through your creative process from beginning to end result?
Robert: It often starts with an image—sometimes a found photo, sometimes something I’ve seen in passing. I sit with it, sketch, research, let it marinate. Then comes the painting, which is slow and deliberate. Layer by layer, I’m building not just a picture but a space to think inside of.
Can you also tell me about your use of symbolism?
Robert: Symbolism, for me, emerges through repetition. I don’t set out to make a symbol, but when an object keeps appearing—like a candle, a teacup, a book—I start to listen. It’s less about imposing meaning than allowing meaning to accrue.
How do you approach color?
Robert: My palette is extremely limited. I don’t like too many options and I thrive in a state of restraint.
So with what we just talked about, what are you hoping to convey?
Robert: That beauty isn’t an escape from pain—it’s a way through it. That the act of painting can hold contradictions without collapsing them. That mourning is a form of meaning-making. Maybe even that painting itself is a kind off mourning.
You have a solo presentation coming up in October, with Anat Ebgi, at Frieze, titled “The Work of Mourning.” What’s the story behind that title?
Robert: The central objects are mass-produced yahrzeit candles—grief, made for the shelves of markets. I’m drawn to their bluntness and anonymity. And yet they’re used in deeply personal rituals. That contradiction became the basis for the project.
They’re not beautiful in an obvious sense. But they mean something. You light one when someone dies, or when you want to say that I haven’t forgotten. You don’t light it for you—you light it for them. And maybe for the silence between you –Like a still life for the afterlife.
The title comes from Jaques Derrida— he writes that mourning is not something we finish, but something we do. To mourn ethically, he says, is to remain faithful to the other’s singularity—to resist turning them into part of ourselves, or allowing their absence to be absorbed and forgotten. That paradox is at the core of this new work: how do I attend to what’s gone, without appropriating it? How do I hold space for grief in a world that prizes efficiency, sameness, repetition and forgetting?—there’s mourning, there’s honor, there’s the impossibility of grief—but honestly, what’s most salient for me is the quiet. The restraint. The refusal to make drama out of death.
While we’re on the topic. Did you do any form of specific research for these new works
Robert: Yes—I spent time studying the material history of these candles, how and where they’re made, and how they circulate through Jewish mourning practices. I also dove into texts on ritual, sanctification, and grief—particularly writings by Abraham Joshua Heschel, Derrida, and Freud.
Ok Robert, now to something totally different. In a parallel universe who would you be? and what would you be doing?
Robert: I’d be a baseball player. I was pretty serious about it growing up, but at a certain point I had to choose where to put my time. My son plays in college now, and I was his coach for many years. That part of my life—discipline, physicality, rhythm—still informs how I approach painting.
Outside of art, what’s something you’re obsessed with right now—maybe a hobby, a show, or even a food—that keeps you grounded or inspired?
Robert: Almost every Friday, I make flower arrangements before Shabbat. It’s become a quiet ritual—choosing colors, shapes, textures. It’s a way to mark time, to slow down, to prepare a space for rest. There’s something deeply satisfying about arranging something ephemeral.
What qualities do you find most important in the people you choose to spend time with?
Robert: Curiosity, humility, humor. People who don’t rush to fill silence. People who can hold contradiction.
Anybody you look up to?
Robert: Too many to name. But right now, I’m thinking about Louise Bourgeois—how she never shied away from pain, but made it into something living.
What motivates you?
Robert: The need to make sense of things and to make things.
How would you describe a perfect day?
Robert: Early light. Coffee. Studio time. A long walk. Dinner with my wife and sons. Nothing urgent.
Alright Robert, I always ask these two questions at the end of an interview. The first is. What’s your favorite movie(s) and why?
Robert: The Fog of War by Errol Morris. It’s a film I think about a lot—especially the way Robert McNamara had to make decisions during the Vietnam War that were disturbingly rational. He talks about calculating, in business-like terms, how many lives would be lost based on different U.S. military actions. There’s something absolutely chilling in that kind of logic.
I think about that tension in my own work—the space between beauty and brutality, between surface calm and historical violence. Like the film, I’m interested in how we process what is unresolvable—how we live with contradiction.
The second is. What song(s) are you currently listening to the most right now?
Robert: The Big Ship by Brian Eno… right now and always. it’s a giant song