Dave Shrobe

Region: Northeast

 David Shrobe creates multilayered portraits and assemblage paintings made in part from everyday materials that he finds in multiple geographies. He disassembles pieces of furniture, especially from around his familial home in Harlem, separating wood from fabric, and recombines them as supports for collage, painting, and drawing. What manifests are figures assembled by signaled body parts. Fragments depict each figure to offer an uncanny outline that exerts a presence of being. Traversing different approaches, his work brings notions of identity, history, and memory into question while challenging conventions of classical portraiture. Shrobe produces new narratives, fragmented and nonlinear, that feel intimate and personal without being anchored to a specific time or place.