Variants

Robin Rhode, Requiem for a Pavilion of Silence, 2010, digital animation. Photograph: © Robin Rhode, courtesy White Cube

The Variants exhibition at Hoxton’s White Cube shows new work by South African-born artist Robin Rhode.

Rhode’s previous work has been strongly imbued with the aesthetic of street art, deploying unlikely media such as soap and chalk to reference urban music, graffiti and the gritty feel of youth culture.  The multi-media artist is known for his bicycle made out of soap, drawings of everyday practices such as rope-skipping, and photographic engagement with street scenes that evoke the slapstick language of early silent films.

His new work takes a more abstract turn, drawing inspiration from Dutch and French cultural figures. The show includes five animations that take the chair designs of Dutch furniture designer and architect Gerrit Rietveld as a starting point. A member of the De Stijl movement, Rietveld sought to bring high art to ordinary people with designs that aspired to pure abstraction and universality.

Rhode’s animations play with these design concepts to create absurd scenarios. In Piano Chair a composer tries to ‘kill’ his piano by drowning it and striking it with various objects. In Military Chair two figures dressed in military garb interact with chairs in different ways, one breaking his chair and the other preserving it.

Also in the exhibition are two series of photographs, one drawing on French thinker Blaise Pascal’s mathematical theories, and the other on the theme of numbers from the Fibonacci system.

Born in Cape Town in 1976, Rhode was raised in Johannesburg and graduated from the South African School of Film, Television and Dramatic Arts and Johannesburg in 2000. His work has been included in several group exhibitions in the United States and Italy. He had his first solo exhibition at the Haus der Kunst, Munich in 2007. The Hayward Gallery in London also hosted a solo show by the artist in 2008. Rhode now lives and works in Berlin.

Robin Rhode: Variants
8 June – 9 July
White Cube
48 Hoxton Square
N1 6PB
020 7930 5373