HOUSTON, TX.- Rice University Art Gallery has commissioned MAMBO JAMBO: Cabinet of the Cosmos, a new installation by Charlie Roberts, which will be on view January 24 – March 2, 2008. Charlie Roberts creates obsessively detailed paintings, each of which is its own universe. Characterized as “psychological museums,” his paintings are filled with portraits of family and friends, musicians, sports figures, birds, animals, corporate logos, book covers, and accurately rendered paintings from art history, all arranged in off-kilter grids, swirling compositions of concentric circles, or imaginary architecture. Says Roberts, “I am a ‘maximalist’ at heart and love to pack things to the gills.” A 2006 work, Picasso’s Tomb, an epic homage to the work of Pablo Picasso, is composed of hundreds of quickly, yet exactingly rendered Picasso paintings hung salon style in a monumental architectural space. Also a sculptor, Roberts has used paper, paint, and hot glue to create larger than life-size figures of friends and family members. In 2007, he carved an 8-foot high figure of his wife from a single log.

At Rice Gallery, Roberts will combine painting and sculpture to create MAMBO JAMBO: Cabinet of the Cosmos, his first site-specific installation. A colossal wooden cabinet will reach almost to the gallery’s ceiling; its open doors will extend toward the gallery’s side walls. Roberts will fill the cabinet with wooden sculptures he will build on site, while the doors will be covered with almost 200 of his detailed paintings. The installation is inspired by Roberts’s 2006 painting, Mystery Cabinet, a take-off on the “cabinets of curiosities,“in which wealthy 17th century Europeans displayed their art collections and souvenirs of the natural world. Roberts is interested in the stories behind such mementos, and notes that Cabinet of the Cosmos, “will fit many stories and objects into a small area.”

Roberts invented the phrase “mambo jambo” to describe his installation. He associates it with his music – his bluegrass band refers to playing music as “jambo” – with voodoo, and with gumbo, where everything is thrown into a single pot.

Charlie Roberts was born in Hutchinson, Kansas in 1983. He started making art in high school when he and his friends made posters to promote their band. Not until he took an art class from an especially influential high school art teacher did he become, as he puts it, “obsessed” with painting. Still, art did not seem like a realistic option to him, so he entered the University of Kansas as a history major. There he heard an art history professor tell such vivid stories about visual artists and their work that he committed himself to art, left the University of Kansas, and enrolled at the Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he studied painting for two years.

Since 2005, Roberts has had solo exhibitions at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and Vancouver, British Columbia. In 2006, his work was included in the group exhibition, Paint, at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia. A solo exhibition of his work will open at Kravets/Wehby Gallery, New York, on December 15. Roberts lives and works in Asker, Norway.

Rice Gallery exhibitions and programs receive major support from Rice Gallery Patrons and Members, The Brown Foundation, Inc., The Louisa Stude Sarofim 1995 Charitable Trust, and the Kilgore Endowment. Exhibition catalogues are funded in part by the Robert J. Card, M.D. and Karol Kreymer Catalogue Endowment. The gallery receives partial operating support from the City of Houston. KUHF-FM and Saint Arnold Brewing Company provide in-kind support.