Robert Polidori (Canadian, b. 1951) illuminates human pathos at the intersection of man's desire for structure as evidenced by rooms, places and the impact of larger environmental forces. Acknowledging the Italian word for "camera" as “room,” and the use of the machine as a metaphor for sight, Polidori's masterful understanding of Renaissance and post-Renaissance perspectives create lush, eloquent images where the traces of human experience come alive. It is the layers of history and the collective remnants of a place's past inhabitants that drive Polidori and have created his iconic body of work. Whether breathing in the memories and life of those rooms standing as a testament to man's greatness and ambition at Versailles or the fading beauty of Havana, Cuba, Polidori also documents human environments touched by great sadness and destruction as evidenced by his work in Cherynobyl and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
The The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York held a critically acclaimed exhibition of Polidori’s After the Flood images in 2006. He has had mid-career retrospectives at the Musee d'Art Contemporain de Montreal and the Instituto Moreira Salles Museum in Rio and Sao Paulo, Brazil. His work is held in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, among others. Robert Polidori lives and works between New York and Los Angeles.
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The The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York held a critically acclaimed exhibition of Polidori’s After the Flood images in 2006. He has had mid-career retrospectives at the Musee d'Art Contemporain de Montreal and the Instituto Moreira Salles Museum in Rio and Sao Paulo, Brazil. His work is held in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, among others. Robert Polidori lives and works between New York and Los Angeles.
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