Bortolami is pleased to announce an exhibition by Robert Bordo and Sam Anderson with Michel Auder. The exhibition explores the contingencies that transpire when three artists present discrete works of painting, sculpture, and video together for the first time.

Thirteen works by Bordo painted between 1989 and now will hang in both gallery rooms, creating unexpected pairings between past and present works. Bordo’s first exhibited paintings in New York during the late 1980s were abstract landscapes; embedded cartographies covered in dun colors of grey-gold and watery blues and greens. In the 1990s, Bordo began making dense, textural monochromatic works with patterns, speech bubbles, stars, and footprints. He also began outlining some of these works in the red, white, and blue stripes of airmail envelopes, anticipating his Postcard Paintings in which he depicted landscapes from postcards and photographs on monochromatic canvases. Bordo’s recent works continue to alter viewers’ experience of the picture plane and it’s framework, fixing their gaze outwards from the vantage point of car windshields, rearview mirrors, eyeglasses, windows and screens, everyday locations, where thoughts and emotions, content and abstraction merge.

Sam Anderson’s female figures, molded in grey clay, stand, crouch, and sit on the gallery floor, silhouetted against puddles of salt and pepper. Their stern expressions suggest exasperation, as if their displeasure stems from their laborious conception. The sculptures are unadorned, save for a few wearing overalls like Disney kids of indeterminable ages. The narrative is irrelevant—what is leftover is a sense of deliberate positioning, peculiar materiality, and general unease. In the second room, Anderson and Michel Auder present four new works that only emerge as collaborations in situ. Anderson’s white clay figures and a found transparent figurine lie in repose on pedestals watching Auder’s videos of the curious scenes he encounters day-to-day or finds online. On one screen a techno rave rages unabated as the beat resounds through the room. Other screens display disparate, impromptu iPhone videos, such as butterflies gathering on a field in slow motion, the passing scenery viewed from a bus with blue-tinted windows, and a moving walkway at an airport. The sculptural spectators converge with the moving images as they absorb the glow emitted by the monitors.

While the artists share geographic and spatial proximity, the connections between the artworks in the exhibition are not immediately apparent. There is, however, an associative schema that surfaces. Lacking narrative, one is forced to reckon with each work’s strange familiarity; their moods and tones, their positioning in the space, their materiality, their unease. By putting individual elements in close proximity to one another—without a specific reason or thesis, associations between works inevitably arise. Bordo and Anderson, along with Auder, allow and provoke, perhaps unwittingly, the inevitable recollection of shared, generic memories.

Sam Anderson (b.1982, Los Angeles) lives and works in New York. She is a graduate of Yale University (MFA). Recent solo exhibitions include Rowhouse Project, Baltimore and Tanya Leighton, Berlin. Her work has been shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions in the United States and Europe, including Overduin & Co, Los Angeles; Maccarone, New York; Anthology Film Archives, New York; and White Columns, New York. She has had recent solo exhibitions at SculptureCenter, New York; Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin; Chapter, New York. Her work was recently featured in Greater New York at MoMA PS1, New York.

Robert Bordo (b.1949, Montreal) lives and works in New York. He has been an Associate Professor of Art at The Cooper Union, New York since 1996. Recent solo exhibitions include The Suburban, Oak Park, IL; Alexander and Bonin Gallery, New York; and Mummery + Schnelle, London. Most recently, his paintings were exhibited in Greater New York at MoMA PS1. Previously, his work has been featured in exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum fur Gegenwartskunst in Basel, the Tel Aviv Musuem of Art and is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, and the Blanton Museum of Art among others. Bordo has been the recipient of many prestigious awards and fellowships including the 2014 Robert de Niro Sr. Painting Prize, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Canada Council Arts Grants, the Tesuque Foundation Arts Fellowship Award, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and a Painting Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Michel Auder (b.1945, Soissons) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Basel; Martos Gallery, New York; Culturgest, Lisbon; NoPlace, Oslo; Lund Konsthall, Sweden. Auder’s solo screenings include dOCUMENTA, Kassel, Germany and Anthology Film Archives, New York. His film, The Feature, was screened at MoMA, New York. He has had solo exhibitions at Kayne Griffin Corcoran Gallery, Santa Monica; Galleria Fonti, Naples, Italy; Cubitt, London; and Yvon Lambert, Paris; and his work has been included in exhibitions such as the 2nd Athens Biennial, the 5th Berlin Biennial, and the Whitney Biennial. In 2002, he had two retrospectives at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and at Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmo.