Biography
Tabor Robak’s work employs computer generated imaging to create videos of invented worlds. Working in programs including Unity, After Effects, Photoshop and Cinema 4D, the artist explores a secondary, digital reality, rendered in what he refers to as a “Photoshop tutorial aesthetic” or a “desktop screensaver aesthetic.” His meticulously produced and filmed environments are cobbled together from sources both sampled and hand-modeled. The works are appropriative, both in their subject matter and aesthetic, using elements purchased and then edited for his purposes. They adopt the visual vocabulary of contemporary video games in order to isolate and comment upon digital space as an abstract fact, while simultaneously pushing up against the increasingly tenuous separation between perceptions of the digital and the real.
Tabor Robak is based in Paris, France. Selected (group) exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Serpentine Galleries, London; the 12th Lyon Biennale; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MoMA: PS1, New York; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; Palazzo delle Esponizioni, Rome; Kunsthal Rotterdam and Upstream Gallery Amsterdam. His work is included in numerous public and private collections, including those of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens; The Hugo Brown Family Collection, The Hague; KRC Collection, Amsterdam; Fondazione Sandretto re Rebaudengo, Turin; Migros Museum, Zurich; and the Yuz Collection, Shanghai. The work of Tabor Robak has been reviewed in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, Artforum, Art Observed, Modern Painters, Interview and Mousse.