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Robin Grebe's work explores the way our bodies carry experience.

In compositions of solitary figures which embody or display a variety of images each body bears the weight of a personal story and is in a direct way transformed by the narrative of its elements. While Grebe's work is sometimes melancholy, her figures, whether they bend in a breeze or carry within them a vision of love, can also be testaments to grace and endurance. She casts torsos as well as full figures and her imagery has ranged over the years from trees, nests and branches to boats and constellations derived from ancient star maps.

In her most recent pieces Grebe employs images of birds, which have long been used in Eastern and Western art as a symbol of spirituality. They represent the intangible and magical moments in life which the artist juxtaposes with our eternal quest for an empirical, full and absolute understanding of the workings of the universe. The battle between our desire to fly (as represented by bird images, some from wall fragments dating to the 1st and 2nd centuries) and our own weight and gravity is retold in these pieces. Through the metaphor of flight and humanity’s elusive search for the mythic freedom and divinity bestowed by it, Grebe echoes the greater themes which have been the common thread in all her work. The slender figures and graceful torsos containing this imagery convey both ‘the personal and the prophetic, as they fortify our dreams and give substance to our myths.’

Robin Grebe is a graduate of Tyler School of Art and has been an instructor at the Rhode Island School of Design, the Massachusetts College of Art and the Pilchuck School. She is the recipient of grants from the New England Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has been exhibited in Europe, Japan and the United States and is included in the collections of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY and the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, NY.

Exhibit Information
Robin Grebe