NEW YORK, NY.- Greene Naftali announced the addition of two new artists to its program this summer: mid-career multimedia artist Cory Arcangel (b. 1978) and emerging painter Andy Robert (b. 1984).

Cory Arcangel’s practice traffics in the vernacular of the internet and digital technology, mingling various eras of the relatively new fields in a demonstration of how quickly they become obsolete. Repurposing hacking as an artistic practice, Arcangel’s interventions in existing and outmoded technologies highlight aesthetic anachronisms, alternately triggering nostalgia and repelling retrained sensibilities. Often using the structure and vocabulary of technological systems as material—a conceptual approach which connects him to the legacy of experimental media in his native Buffalo, established by artists like Tony Conrad and Paul Sharits—Arcangel’s body of work reflects the increasing entanglement of digital technology and cultural memory.

Cory Arcangel lives and works in Stavanger, Norway, and Brooklyn, New York. He currently has a survey exhibition, BACK OFF, on view at Firstsite, Colchester, UK. Other recent solo and two-person exhibitions include The Kitchen, New York (2017); Galleria D'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy (2015); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2012); The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2011); and the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich; Tate Britain, London; and others.

Andy Robert’s paintings draw from a breadth of historical and personal references. Interior and contemplative, Robert's topographical abstractions forego specificity in favor of a wandering, poetic ambiguity, a strategic opacity abetted by his deconstructive application of paint, mosaic-like in assemblage. Subject matter from the literature and histories of diaspora and civil rights campaigns is consistently mapped onto the artist's experiences living in Haiti and immigrating to neighborhoods such as East Flatbush and Harlem; roaming from Prospect Park, Eastern Parkway to Los Angeles. In doing so, Robert’s paintings layer temporalities, geographies, subjectivities, and shifts in perspective and scale, their formal opposition of image and abstraction further activating their complexity. His research varies from perfume plantations to slave burial grounds. Recent subjects range lyrically from Yellow Cab drivers, check cashing service centers, street performers, supermarkets, vendors and signs, to Flint, Michigan, Marcus Garvey Park, and the intersection of Malcom X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevards in Harlem. Robert often references the Creole term lakou, which denotes a plot of land encompassing a variety of meanings and usages; communal, self-regulated, of tribal affiliation, and holding a nontransferable inheritance, physically indexing ancestry through multi-family units and reflective of Haiti’s colonial past, historical contradictions and the possibility of a black metropolis.

Andy Robert lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2017). Significant group shows include the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2019); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2018); and Studio Museum in Harlem (2016 – 2017). Robert was also in residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; Skowhegan, ME (2016); and the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York (2015). His work is included in the permanent collection of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.