On May 7, 2025 «I Remembered to Forget», a new solo exhibition by American artist Rob Wynne opens at the Liaigre showroom in New York City. The exhibition will remain on view through October 10, 2025.
In collaboration with Galerie Mitterrand (Paris), Liaigre will showcase original works by Wynne – whose mixed-media artworks, installations, drawings and canvases are part of the permanent collections at Centre Pompidou, The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Whitney Museum of American Art, among others – from his oeuvre spanning more than 50 years. Internationally recognized for his work at the intersection of sculpture and installation, Wynne continually questions our relationship with language. Since the beginning of his career in New York in the 1970s, he has continuously explored the guiding thread of his work: textual material.
Curated by Liaigre’s in-house curator Carlos Sicilia, the exhibition «I Remembered to Forget» expresses Wynne’s long-standing fascination with narrative. Appropriating resonant phrases overheard in his daily life and poetic quotations from his various literary and musical inspirations, Wynne creates works that give a landscape to language.
Wynne tests the boundaries of genres in his delicately crafted mixed-media artworks, installations, drawings and canvases. Though he works with a range of techniques and mediums, poured glass is central to his work. Claiming that he is “always trying to break rules” in glass making, he demonstrates its malleability by shaping it freehand into provocative text pieces and by crafting it into objects both exquisite and absurd—including eyeballs, mushrooms and spider webs.
Text is key to his practice. Wynne plays with words embroidered over images, formed of glass, painted onto objects — all to alter meaning and suggest narratives. In his Embroidered Paintings, for example, he stitches open-ended phrases like “Come back” or “Disregard” over Rococo images, simultaneously sending them up and complicating them, perhaps also hinting that the serious and the playful may be shades of the same thing. Reminiscent of the Surrealist tradition, these works underline the blurring of reality and illusion that characterizes the exhibition.
Photography by Erik Petschek.
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