Robert Kushner (b. 1949, American) is best recognized for his role in and contribution to the Pattern and Decoration movement that spanned the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. This style of artmaking championed work that had been marginalized as feminine or trivial. Kushner’s expansive subject matter and medium bears the influence of Islamic textiles and artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe and the Chinese brush artist Qi Bashi. His ornamental and emotionally charged work Reclining Women #6 (1987) speaks to the artist’s ability to distill mood and form through representational, abstract, and geometric elements. Of his rich and layered compositions, Kushner has said, “Decoration, an abjectly pejorative dismissal for many, is a very big, somewhat defiant declaration for me.”
–Affinities and Outliers: Highlights from the University at Albany Fine Art Collections