Rob Wynne | Always Sometimes

Luciana Brito Gallery is presenting Always Sometimes, the first exhibition by visual artist Rob Wynne in Brazil. Known worldwide for his research that combines the complexity of semantics with the malleability of glass, the North American artist is bringing to Brazil a set of 14 new works, which aptly demonstrate the poetic essence of his work, constructed over the course of his career spanning more than 50 years.

Glass – the principal material used in Always Sometimes – has served as a guiding thread for Rob Wynne to explore facets of language and abstraction. Over the years, working with this material has led the artist down freer and more spontaneous paths, allowing him to move beyond the conventions and traditional standards of glass production. For Wynne, these processes themselves take center stage in his art, as they organically dictate the direction taken by the forms he creates, whether abstract or not. This is seen in certain works featured in this exhibition, such as the works Phantom (2024), DayDream (2023), and Outlook (2023), which demonstrate how drops of molten glass take shape, to then be combined in space to produce appealing, sparkling cosmic explosions.

Rob Wynne is keenly interested in the balance – or imbalance – of language. The subtlety of positioning "Sometimes" after "Always" in the exhibition’s title leads us to ponder both words, separately. The artist is likewise attentive to his own context and to pop culture as sources from which to extract fragments of conversations, literature, theater, cinema, etc., to then combine them into visual syntaxes, as exemplified by the works Hope (2024), Eternity (2023), and Joy! (2024). Thus, Always Sometimes was also conceived as a linguistic construction. The hopeful, perennial and happy connotations of these titles are positioned beside the cosmic explosions of the works, which are alongside the exclamation points formed by the works Pink exclamation (2024) and Exclamation (2023). The exhibition then ends conclusively with the work I do! (2023).