Robert Bordo

Robert Bordo is a New York-based, Canadian-American artist known for paintings that blend modernist formal concerns with postmodern approaches to image, subject matter and metaphor. Throughout his career, he has worked in painting series positioned between representation and abstraction that critics characterize as conceptually structured, yet sensual in execution. These series explore recurring, often overlapping themes, such as memory and experience, the passage of time, landscape and weather phenomena, mapping, and mark-making as an indicator of thought. New York Times critic Roberta Smith described Bordo's early map paintings as charting an idiosyncratic "hybrid discipline … a kind of cartographically conscious rerouting of modernism"; in a 2019 New Yorker review of his "crackup" paintings, Andrea Scott wrote, "Bordo's imagery is an apt metaphor for our current, contentious political climate, but his true subject is painting itself: how easily it can tip realism into abstraction or shift figure-ground relations until it's impossible to discern whether you’re on the inside looking out or vice versa."

Bordo's work belongs to several public art collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Hammer Museum. In 2007, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has also received a Robert De Niro, Sr. Prize and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Canada Council, among other recognition.