ROBERT RUSSELL

For the past several years Robert Russell has painted still lifes of teacups and Allach Porcelain figurines. His latest series, named Stateless Objects depict Judaica—kiddish cups, havdalah sets, challah platters—now housed in public or private collections, where Jewish communities flourished for centuries across North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia.

The dispersal of Judaica often parallels the decline of Jewish communities in these regions, driven by political upheaval, antisemitism, violence, and forced migration. In countries such as Iraq and Libya, significant Jewish artifacts have been neglected or destroyed, underscoring the fragile state of this heritage. Removed from their original domestic and ritual contexts, now immortalized and remembered in Russell’s oil paintings, Stateless Objects raises questions about cultural ownership, memory, and preservation.

The exhibition engages in a form of restoration—not a reconstruction of what was lost, but an act of conceptual repatriation. In Jewish thought human hands play a role in completing the world, in making the divine manifest. Russell’s paintings participate in this sacred act of completion, transforming scattered remnants of history into a presence that can be witnessed.

Responding to these remains, Russell has also painted porcelain vessels—teacups, pots, salt and pepper shakers—produced in Germany before the Nazi occupation, before Aryanization claimed them. These objects, once ordinary, now exist as spectral echoes of a world erased. As one approaches these canvases, the physicality of Russell’s paintings dissolves into a collection of individual marks. Isolated from background, gravity, or contextualizing narrative, the velvety voids in which they float strip everything away until all that remains is the whisper: I am here.

Together, these works explore the fragility of cultural memory and the human role in its restoration and remembrance. Just as the dispersal of Judaica reflects histories of exile and rupture, these porcelain vessels carry the weight of an erased history—objects suspended in time, painting not to restore the past, but to acknowledge it, to call it to the present. Russell’s practice is an invocation, a sanctification of what remains.

Robert Russell (b. 1971, Kansas City, MO) completed his MFA at The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), Valencia, CA and his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Providence, RI. He has had solo exhibitions at galleries including Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; The Cabin, Los Angeles, CA; Burrard Arts Foundation, Vancouver, B.C., Canada; LA><ART, Los Angeles, CA; François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Big Pond Artworks, Munich, Germany; and OSMOS Station, Stamford, NY. His work has been exhibited in group shows including Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, CA; Material Press MOCA LA, Los Angeles, CA; M+B Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles, CA; and Gavlak Projects, Palm Beach, FL. Russell lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.