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July Issue 2007
Artists' Guild of Spartanburg in Spartanburg, SC, Features Works by Robert Urban
The Artists' Guild of Spartanburg will present, Truth Lies in Layers, an exhibit of works by Robert Urban, on view from July 1 - 30, 2007, at the Guild Gallery at the Spartanburg Arts Center in Spartanburg, SC.
The show, consisting of mixed media paintings, marks the Moore, SC, artist's first solo exhibition in Spartanburg, though he has participated in numerous juried and group shows in the area. Urban explains that the title of the exhibit refers both to the extensive build-up of many layers of acrylic glazes he uses to create his paintings and to his personal interest in where truth lies.
"It seems that often truth is twisted and distorted until it's no longer the 'truth'. Truth has become lies, and lies have become the truth, thus, the play on words in the show's title," Urban says of the impetus for his landscape based paintings, several of which reflect the theme by dealing with the issue of global warming and climate change.
"I am a painter of landscapes," Urban says, though he explains that he is not a traditional landscape painter. "Simply put, my artwork is about polar opposites. It hovers somewhere between being abstract and representational, and it primarily reflects the ongoing struggle to coexist between nature and humankind. This is achieved through the development of my own personal symbology, representing this ongoing saga and my perception of it."
In his work, the images of nature and other symbols are layered, collaged, pieced together and juxtaposed in non-traditional landscape arrangements that the artist creates by scraping or sanding away surface paint to reveal previously built-up layers underneath the works, including text and phrases that are often hidden or partially obscured from view.
"By creating an image and destroying part of it, through sanding or scraping, my art mimics what happens to our natural environment daily, either directly or indirectly through human interaction," the artist says of the works that are finally sealed in resin, in a process that he refers to as 'fossilizing the artwork'."
Urban is an art teacher at Dorman High School, where he has taught for the past nine years. His work has been exhibited widely in Greenville, SC, and Columbia, SC, and is currently on display in Daly Designs in Greenville and Merrimon Gallery in Asheville, NC.
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