Robert Andrade: To Move an Obelisk

About the Exhibition

For this solo exhibition in PCG’s Hunt-Cavanagh Gallery, San Diego artist Robert Andrade presents a site-specific installation of new work that builds upon his evolving language of sculpture, public space, Modernist architecture and construction materials as fine art supplies.

This presentation, in which his sculptural forms seem built into the exhibition space’s own architectural footprint, includes various aspects reminiscent of the town square—pavilion-like forms, public gardens and an obelisk monument allude to the sanctity of a place built for the gathering of a democratic public. On display are new truncated assemblages composed of bronze, polished concrete, mirror acrylic and more, each suggesting the bold futurism sought by the Modernist architects’ design of early and mid twentieth-century urban centers. By extension of Modernist architectural history—specifically that of the eras of Russian Constructivist and Brutalist architecture and their influence on American urbanism—Andrade conjures the legacy of the town square as a place of hybrid activity involving intellectual dialogue, contemplation, political ideology, commerce, protest, civic duty, celebration, violence and more.