Red Grooms

(American, born 1937)

Red Grooms is an American artist known for his painted-collage sculptures of both fictional and observed scenes. Characterized by his distinctive stylization and humorous portraits of people, Grooms’s works are constructed from illustration board and a hot glue gun, pieced together into a believable physical space. “In the New York works I’ve done I have tried to make it a kind of portraiture thing where I was really trying to get the texture of what I thought I saw, particularly in the neurosis of the population, and present it in context with the props—the mailboxes, fireplugs, any texture of the city,” he has explained. Born Charles Rogers Grooms on June 7, 1937 in Nashville, TN, he went on to study at the Art Institute of Chicago, before moving to New York in 1956. There, Grooms befriended and exhibited with artists such as Alex Katz, Jim Dine, and Claes Oldenburg, gaining recognition for his unique take on Pop Art. In 1986, the award-winning film Red Grooms: Sunflower in a Hothouse was released, documenting the artist’s process and personality. Grooms continues to live and work in New York, NY. Today, his works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, among others.