ABOUT

ROBERT ROTH
American
b. 1965, New York

“I’m painting the edge of the earth — the fringe where land ends and sky and sea collide. That feeling you get when you look up and suddenly everything feels bigger and quieter at the same time."

Robert Roth’s paintings explore nature, abstraction, and memory. Raised in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, a historic whaling town surrounded by marshlands and open water, Roth developed an early sensitivity to the changing light, atmosphere, and rhythms of the natural world. He studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. Workshop exchanges with Alex Katz and Claes Oldenburg further broadened his education. Drawing has remained a constant throughout Roth’s practice. With a sketchbook always close at hand, he observes the world around him, often spending hours in a single location, allowing its details and changing conditions to reveal themselves. His paintings begin with observation but ultimately follow the imagination. In his ongoing Land Sky Memory series, Roth returns to the horizon as a place of possibility. Expansive skies, open water, and distant landforms become pathways for exploring atmosphere, light, and emotion. The paintings exist somewhere between recognition and abstraction. “I don’t really think of myself as a landscape painter,” he explains. “I think of my paintings more as escapes — LAND + ESCAPE. Water has always been a particular fascination, its reflections and shifting light often revealing the direction of a composition. For Roth, the horizon functions as both anchor and threshold, bringing the viewer into a space that is at once familiar and surreal “ Roth builds his paintings through layers of pigment, working intuitively through addition and subtraction. Brushstrokes are dragged, covered, and brought back into view. He is interested in what happens when a painting begins to take on a life of its own, when an unexpected gesture or shift in color changes the direction of the work. The process is as much about discovery as it is about intention. This same curiosity extends into Roth’s collage practice. Working with geometry, fragmented imagery, and flattened spatial relationships, he explores structure and composition through a language informed by Cubism. Across painting and collage, Roth moves between observation, construction, and improvisation. His influences include Degas, Picasso, Rauschenberg, and Rothko. Jazz is a constant presence in the studio. The music of Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane provides an ongoing source of inspiration—  its rhythms and unexpected shifts finding their way into his approach to painting.

Roth previously served as a professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art before returning fully to his studio practice. His paintings have been exhibited in New York City, East Hampton, Washington, DC, Charlotte, Rhode Island, Houston, Cleveland, Martha’s Vineyard, and Santa Fe. He received a Silver Medal from the Cleveland Museum of Art and (2) Painting Medals from the Heckscher Museum. His work was included in New York City’s American Collage exhibition at Gerald Peters Gallery alongside artists Edward Hopper, Richard Diebenkorn, Romare Bearden and Frank Stella.

Roth’s paintings are held in public and private collections, including the University of Iowa, Boston Children’s Hospital, and Columbia University. International collections include Australia, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand, Russia, South Korea, and Hong Kong.

Roth lives and works in Hudson, Ohio, with his wife, artist Cheryl Roth, a fellow Rhode Island School of Design alumna. They share a nineteenth-century farmhouse and barn studio, spending part of each summer on Martha’s Vineyard.