Artist Robert Russell Is Right Where He Wants To Be

“I was always drawing, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t,” the artist Robert Russell told me recently, on the occasion of his new exhibition, Stateless Objects, at Anat Ebgi Gallery on Wilshire Boulevard through May 10, 2025.

Russell is an artist who thinks deeply, researches madly, obsesses endlessly, invents backstories and histories for his creations, and paints in a style he calls ‘Conceptual Realism.” His work often appears hyper-realistic but contains resonances that deepen and challenge what we are seeing in ways that can be historical, philosophical and emotional. And increasingly over the last five years, and particularly since October 7th, Russell’s work has a strong Jewish dimension. That is also part of his artistic and personal journey.

Russell was born in Kansas City because his father who was in the military was stationed there. When he was five, however, the family moved to the San Fernando Valley, eventually settling deep in the West Valley.

It was the mid-1970s and there was not a lot of culture there, other than BMX and skateboard culture. So, he painted on kid’s jackets, he drew for his school newspaper. “I painted on walls, sanctioned and unsanctioned,” Russell recalled, laughing, “I was a bit of a hooligan.” He had a good high school art teacher, Mr. Hannah, who encouraged him.

Russell had a cousin who went to Arizona State University, and given its then lax admission standards, his father recommended he go there. At ASU, he had a drawing teacher who recognized his talent and told him he should be at an art school. His girlfriend at the time was also an artist and she said, “We should apply to RISD.” To which Russell replied, “What’s RISD?” (The Rhode Island School of Design in Providence is one of the oldest and most prestigious art schools in the US that is known for being immersive and cross-disciplinary – it was where members of Talking Heads first met).

Russell got in. His girlfriend didn’t and went elsewhere. Arriving at RISD Russell refers to as his “Ali, boma ye” moment (the chant when Ali came to Africa to fight George Foreman, found his people, and regained his heavyweight championship). In the Valley and at ASU, Russell. who thought of himself as something of an outsider and a freak, had now found his tribe; and art which, to that point, he had always been made to feel was an unserious pastime, was taken very seriously at RISD.

At RISD, Russell was first exposed to Art History. “I was just a sponge. I absorbed all of that information.” Russell now looks back at RISD as the place where he grew up and got serious about art. From RISD, Russell chose to return to California, to attend CalArts’ graduate program which had a decidedly conceptual bent, he said, “because I knew that’s what I needed.” At CalArts he studied with Tom Lawson and Charles Gaines (for whom he was a teaching assistant during Russell’s second year). “I can’t say enough wonderful things about that experience.”

“It’s a really interrogative kind of environment,” Russell said, explaining that everyone’s work was looked at critically and where every mark on a canvas is meant to have meaning. “You don’t make your best work in grad school, and if you do, you’re doing something wrong.”

Russell, although from a Jewish family, had not grown up in a particularly observant background or had any deep education in and engagement with Judaism. That changed for him in 2010 when he was invited to attend ReBoot, which describes its summit as a “gathering that convenes a diverse group of prominent Jewish change agents in an intellectually-provocative environment that inspires them to discover new ways to engage with their Judaism.”

“It was a really great experience – and I met some incredible Jews.” For Russell, it “flipped the switch” on his identity in ways that he could mine for meaning.

However, his Jewishness which grew as he raised his kids and they had their bnei mitzvahs, didn’t, as Russell put it, infiltrate his practice until Covid.

Russell had been making these large paintings of teacups that were realistic, and at the same time very painterly in terms of how Russell rendered the porcelain, its glazes, and how light played on its surfaces.

The teacup series was born out of a certain conceptual framework as well as the many deep-dives down rabbit holes they engendered. So, for example, Russell made a rule that he would only make paintings of teacups he found on Ebay.

He could not understand why someone would put a teacup on Ebay and sell it for $5 – less than the cost to ship it. In response, Russell developed a theory of what he calls, “ritual exchanges,” in which a person has a teacup that may have come from a parent or grandparent that the person doesn’t want and can’t give away, so they put it on Ebay at an impossibly low cost in hope that someone else will adopt into their household.

“I decided these were ritual offerings from the world,” Russell said. “They’re fragile and they’re beautiful.” They were outsized, Russell explained, because during Covid our domestic lives became outsized. “These enormous paintings of teacups were kind of iconic of that moment for me.”

While digging into the world of porcelain, Russell discovered Allach, a German company based near Munich that began producing porcelain items in 1935. The following year, the company was acquired by Nazi SS and Gestapo leader Heinrich Himmler to produce works representative of German culture. The factory was moved to a new facility near the Dachau concentration and Allach is alleged to have used slave labor from the camp (some sources dispute this). The Allach figures, of animals, rural life, historical figures, and soldiers, proved very popular among the Nazi leadership and among the civilian German population.

Russell was taken with the idea of the Nazis deploying beautiful items, bordering on kitsch, while pursuing their murderous campaign against the Jews. Not unlike recent works such as the play Here There Are Blueberries, and the film Zone of Interest which portray the Nazis who played happily while the Jews burned, Russell took on the challenge of creating works that spoke to the false façade and emptiness of the Nazi enterprise.

Russell came up with a paint mixture that delivered a glaze-like sheen, making the paintings otherworldly. Knowing the porcelain’s history made the work haunting. The teacup series was conceptually and artistically successful, but not necessarily emotionally engaging or infused in any meaningful sense with the personal beyond its Nazi history.

For Russell, one series eventually and inevitably leads to the next so while continuing to mine images from the internet, he painted porcelain works by Jewish firms the Nazis nationalized such as Rosenthal, Schumann, and Edelstein, which are featured in the current exhibition.

Then came October 7th, after which Russell found the response from his friends in the art world and creative communities, “downright disheartening, disappointing, infuriating.” Russell said, “I was sad, angry, furious.” Around that same time, he came across an article in the New York Times about New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art decision to repatriate several works of art from Yemen. However, Yemen, in the grips of civil war. asked the Museum to continue to retain them for safekeeping.

Russell began to wonder what became of all the Judaica from Jews expelled from Arab lands (Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Tunisia and Morrocco). “It remains a very good question,” Russell said. But he had found the subject matter for the series now on view at Anat Ebgi, “Stateless Objects.”

To Russell, these Mizrachi communities, once vibrant, had disappeared. And so he began to discover items online, redolent of Jewish history and culture, to paint. Among the “Stateless Objects” of the exhibition are a looted fork, a Sabbath teapot, a glass kiddish cup, a kiddush cup from Corfu.

The paintings are not as hard edged as the porcelain cups. Rather their edges seem to be in less focus or even disappearing, which Russell acknowledges as intentional. “The histories [of the objects] are ambiguous, so I am trying to make the paintings appear ambiguous, almost like apparitions.” As these communities have been decimated or vanished, he describes the paintings as “dematerializing.” For Russell, this is both a formal challenge and also a conceptual exercise.

The response to the work, Russell said, has been positive. He will show a different iteration of the exhibition next October at Frieze London.

There is one work that is not like the others, neither teacup, porcelain, nor lost item from the Jewish Levant. It is of a lit Manischewitz-branded Yitzkhor memorial candle, the kind you might find at the local grocery. That painting totally wrecked me. It says so much without having to say anything at all. It speaks to the Jewish past, and about our present moment. I can’t stop thinking about it.

With Stateless Objects, Russell has broken through the remove of his past works to create new contemporary work that is authentic to who he is. This where his personal, intellectual, and artistic journey had brought him.

“This is where I want to be right now,” Russell told me.