Through ceramics and his first exhibition with the gallery, A Veritable Minefield of Useless Information, ROBERT HORVATH explores the societal concept of the “meme” established in the 1970s by Richard Dawkins – an idea, behavior, style, or usage that escalates from person to person within a culture. More specifically, he is interested in how ideas operate, travel, and become warped in our digital age; often accelerating this process and contributing to further spread of misinformation. Like a game of telephone, the longer distance that a concept travels, the more distortion it may endure, evolving within and directly affecting our culture.

Horvath’s amorphic, organic forms resemble living things that have grown little by little, stacking and clustering, amassing in size and context from its original state, much like the growth patterns of crystals, fungi, or modern myths. Their indulgent colors and textures recall the seductive quality of hearsay, and the seemingly unstable forms point to the precarious situations that can arise when our thought is decidedly not based in truth. By bringing these abstract fables into the physical world, Horvath critiques this phenomenon and confronts the viewer with the aftermath it can leave behind.

About the Artist

ROBERT HORVATH (born Nitra, Slovakia, 1974) received a BFA from Midwestern State University (1999) and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2002). Horvath follows a philosophy unbound from any one medium, reflected in his facility with painting, digital media, sculpture, and ceramics. Guided by multidisciplinary reflections on gender and sexuality, his work has spanned explorations of youthful hedonism in the early 2000s to temporal pastiches of homo-erotica that draw on Rococo aesthetics.

Horvath's present work plays with ideas of inventedness and amorphism, an unsuspectingly natural development in his diverse corpus to date. He has exhibited his work at Packer-Schopf Gallery in Chicago; Bert Green Fine Art in Los Angeles and Chicago; Lyonsweir Gallery in NYC; and Jolie Laide in Philadelphia, among others. Horvath is an Associate Professor of Painting at the Herron School of Art and Design at Indiana University.