At 81 Robin Bright’s : Exquisite Elegance of Minimalist Objects
In our age of overabundant social media hype and marketing, reticence about self-promotion can hinder some artists from getting their due. Such is the case for Robin Bright, who prefers to let his work speak for itself. His exquisitely crafted work tends to converse with us in quiet and subtle ways anyway.
It’s been many years since Bright, now 81, had a solo museum exhibition in his own San Diego County backyard — or anywhere else. A show surveying his body of work at the Oceanside Museum of Art — opening February 6 and continuing through July 24 — is his first retrospective in a museum setting since 1981.
“I’ve been more interested in what galleries could do for me,” Bright says, “in what I needed for the wherewithal to go to the studio everyday.”
In the 1980s and 1990s, he exhibited regularly at either of two La Jolla galleries: Quint or Thomas Babeor, earning admiration from critics and collectors alike. His work also garnered attention in Los Angeles with the late Burnett Miller and his space on La Brea. But in the last decade or so, his solo shows have been in non-commercial spaces, such as the Taylor Library in Pacific Beach in 2008, where he exhibited a vibrant series of intricately patterned brightly colored wall compositions in plaster.
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