Untitled/Harvest
The work occupies a pivotal position within his early explorations of drawing, performance, and animation as interdependent practices. In this stop-frame digital work, Rhode stages himself as a lone agricultural labourer in an urban environment, transforming a black wall into a site of cyclical growth, destruction, and rest. Executed through successive gestures of spraying, cutting, harvesting, and repose, Harvest collapses distinctions between rural and urban, nature and artifice, and labour and ritual. The work is emblematic of Robin Rhode’s broader project: to reanimate drawing as an embodied, time-based action rather than a static mark.
Formally, the animation draws upon the ethos of Arte Povera, particularly its emphasis on humble materials, process, and transformation. Rhode’s “seeds” are lines of white spray paint, his grasses ephemeral strokes that exist only through the accumulation of frames. The wall becomes both ground and horizon, a pictorial field that recalls blackboard drawings while simultaneously invoking agricultural cycles. By inserting himself into this animated drawing, Rhode performs a choreography of cultivation that is at once poetic and strenuous. The final gesture—lying beneath a white sheet fashioned from the harvested plants—suggests rest, burial, and renewal in a single image, reinforcing the work’s dreamlike oscillation between life and exhaustion. Conceptually, Harvest resonates strongly with the socio-political landscape of post-apartheid South Africa. The cycles of sowing and reaping function as metaphors for regeneration, historical reckoning, and the ongoing labour of rebuilding social structures after systemic violence. Rhode’s solitary figure does not present utopia; rather, it emphasises process over completion, effort over resolution. In this sense, metamorphosis in Harvest is neither instantaneous nor guaranteed—it must be repeatedly enacted.
The presentation of Harvest at Villa Legodi is therefore particularly resonant. Situated within the Cradle of Humankind, a site deeply associated with origins, evolution, and deep time, Villa Legodi offers a context in which Rhode’s meditation on cycles of growth and renewal acquires an expanded temporal dimension. The animation’s agricultural gestures echo humanity’s earliest relationships to land and survival, while its contemporary materials and urban setting insist on the persistence of these concerns in the present. Shown at Villa Legodi, Harvest bridges ancestral histories and contemporary artistic practice, aligning Rhode’s performative drawing with a landscape that itself embodies continual processes of becoming.
Robin Rhode (ZA/DE)
Robin Rhode was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1976. He currently lives and works in Berlin since 2002. Rhode studied at the University of Johannesburg as well as at the Association of Film and Dramatic Arts (AFDA), from 1996 to 2001.
The Berlin-based multidisciplinary artist engages in a variety of visual languages such as photography, performance, drawing, painting, and sculpture to create arrestingly beautiful narratives that are brought to life using quotidian materials such as soap, charcoal, chalk and paint. Coming of age in a newly post-apartheid South Africa, Rhode was exposed to new forms of creative expression motivated by the spirit of the individual rather than dictated by a political or social agenda. The growing influence of music, film, and popular sports on youth culture as well as the community’s reliance on storytelling in the form of colourful murals encouraged the development of Rhode’s hybrid street-based aesthetic.
His strategic interventions transform urban landscapes into imaginary worlds, compressing space and time, as two-dimensional renderings become the subject of three-dimensional interactions by a sole protagonist, usually played by the artist or by an actor inhabiting the role of artist. Melding individual expressionism with broader socio-economic concerns, Rhode’s work reveals a mastery of illusion, a rich range of historical and contemporary references, and an innate skill for blending high and low art forms.
Rhode is currently presenting a large-scale wall painting commission titled 'Der Botanischer Garten' in association with the Das Minsk Museum in Potsdam, Germany, and the Hasso Plattner Foundation. Rhode is also included in the group exhibition titled 'Corps et âmes' at the Bourse de Commerce, Pinault Foundation, Paris, France. Rhode has had major solo and group exhibitions at a number of important museums around the world such as Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, Museum of Modern Art, NY, USA, Museum Voorlinden, Netherlands, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart Berlin, Germany, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, Hayward Gallery, London, UK, The Drawing Center, New York. Furthermore, Rhode has participated at 51st International Venice Biennale, Italy, Biennale of Sydney, Australia, The New Orleans Biennial, USA, Moscow Biennale, Russia, Yokohama Triennale, Japan, Taipei Biennale, Taiwan, Busan Biennale, South Korea. Rhode's work in public collections: Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy, Galleria Civica D'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin, Italy, Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin/Düsseldorf, Germany, Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA, The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York, USA, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada, Pérez Art Museum Miami, USA, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, USA, Brooklyn Museum, New York, USA, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, USA, South African National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa, Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker, Norway, National Museum of Art Oslo, Norway.
