My multi-media practice finds its psychological analogs in blurring beauty and grotesquery, nostalgia, and critique. I’m interested in the universal psychology of the every day, then making it my own. Using recognizable household objects, I paint and deconstruct them, transforming these banal objects into sculptures. I situate this practice in a place where high and low interact and cross-pollinate. In so doing, the work suggests an underground or alternative narrative of how and why visual ideas develop; because my language draws in such a large part from the private realm of domestic environments, the work elicits emotional responses that are both uncannily familiar and disarmingly strange.
Robert Melee is an American multi-disciplinary artist who has been exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions in both national and international venues, including Tuscan MOCA (solo), Columbus College of Art & Design (solo), Columbus, Milwaukee Art Museum (solo), Milwaukee, Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington D.C. (solo), The Contemporary Art Museum Houston, New Jersey MoCA, NJ, Higher Pictures, NYC (solo) MoMA PS1, Queens, Sculpture Center, Queens, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY, White Cube, London UK (solo), Sutton Lane, London UK (solo), David Kordansky, CA (solo), Portugal Biennial, Lisbon, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, Gallery Hyundai, Korea.
In 2018, Melee was awarded Artist in Residence, Tucson MOCA, Tucson, AZ, and in 2015, Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, New York, NY. Melee spent 5 weeks in 2010 at the Center for Contemporary Art Residency (Futura), Prague, and 4 months per year in the 1998-2000 National Foundation for the Advancement in the Arts Residency, Miami, FL.
Melee is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Haifa Museum of Art in Haifa, the Milwaukee Museum of Art, the Portland Museum of Art, the Allen Memorial Art Museum, and Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio.
Robert Melee’s work has been reviewed numerous times in publications internationally, including Sculpture Magazine, The New York Times, Artforum, Modern Painters, Art In America, Flash Art, The Village Voice, Art Review, NY Observer, Art Papers, Bomb, Zing, Architectural Digest, among others.
Melee received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York, NY.
