NEW YORK, NY.- Janet Borden, Inc. opened an exhibition of new work by polymath artist Robert Cumming. Robert Cumming: Implied Narrative presents recent drawings of nudes. They seem drawn from life, but they are totally the product of his imagination.

A compelling yet elusive narrative epitomizes Robert Cumming's work, informed by his overlapping interest and facility in painting, sculpture, and photography. Recurring motifs in his work include tools of measurement, architecture, and the human form, Strange and enticing clues evade logic adding to a nonexistent mystery.

In 2005's Camera Club, two females wander around in a modernist living room with their cameras at the ready. Their nudity is of no importance, except that the modeling and the tonality of the figures are the dominant features of the drawing. Is there a story there?

Conte crayon and pastels are the mediums. Cumming's extraordinary talent belies the difficulty of working with these materials on black or colored paper. As critic Loring Knoblauch observed, “With Cumming, it’s a constant pitched battle of cerebral illogic.” This is Robert Cumming's eighth exhibition with the gallery.

Robert Cumming was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1943. He currently is moving from Whately, Massachusetts to Desert Palms, California. His painting, sculpture and photographic work have all been widely exhibited since the early 1970s. He has received grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, 1980-1981; the National Endowment for the Arts, 1972, 1975, 1979. His photographs were shown in 1999 at The Museum of Modern Art in a solo exhibition, The Clutter of Happenstance. Among his many other solo exhibitions are: Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; A retrospective of his photography, The Difficulties of Nonsense, was exhibited first at George Eastman Museum, Rochester in 2017, and will open at UCR/California Museum of Photography in 2019.