ROB PRUITT | SUICIDE PAINTING XXX

Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2014

Ever since the beginning of his career in the early 1990s, Rob Pruitt has navigated the thin line between the playful and the provocative. His Suicide Paintings, of which this is one, riff on the supposed “death of painting” debate while also grappling with an urge to erase all the imagery he had used before. Simulating a door or window into a new place, the present example simultaneously evokes a Mark Rothko canvas, a Josef Albers square, and a James Turrell installation.