Cadmium on the Cusp
Robert Younger
Sept. 25 - Nov. 15, 2025
FEATURED ARTIST
ABOUT THE SHOW
Is there poetry in a five gallon compound bucket?
Viewing the use Robert Younger makes of them as a staple in his sculptor’s toolkit it would certainly seem so. He collected these versatile vessels in his studio on Water Street near the Brooklyn Bridge in N.Y.C,. where he lived and worked for over 35 years until the waters of superstorm Sandy had them floating against the ceiling of his basement studio. The sight of his studio, with its contents now bobbing, was a strong signal to leave Lower Manhattan and relocate on higher ground Mid-Coast Maine.
On the side of these standard buckets is a warning sign for danger of drowning for very young children. Younger made a collage with a drawing, a self portrait as an old man about to dive into one of them. As an artist he has seen its poetic potential. A number of colorful upside down 5 gallon buckets now function as support elements for his large wall piece Leaning Bypass and companion piece Wheel of Art currently on view at Cove Street Arts in Portland, Maine.
Robert Younger started making art in the mid nineteen-sixties when Minimalism, Conceptualism and Arte Povera were unfolding. The ability to raise mundane materials from industrial lumberyards, such as plywood, cement blocks and standard cut boards and beams, to higher goals in art making was very attractive to young artists, and Younger developed a keen eye and natural sense for incorporating and developing his own vocabulary with these kinds of building blocks in his art making.
Even as a child, he made a drawing The Three Bears sitting next to each other in sizes Small, Medium and Large, revealing a profound insight and focus on the poetry of standard and measure that Younger continues to subtly include in his art.
It is also evident in his use of color, which evolved from the artist’ first memories of exposure to the red, white and green of Christmas. Standardized colors and their permutations from pre-existing cans of ready-made spray paint become his palette.
We have seen and lived with many of his works over the years, and there is the sense that a poem is living within them. The beauty in the words of the modern poet William Carlos Williams, The Red Wheelbarrow, comes to mind.
The colorful capsule combinations find their roots in his father’s pharmacy in Philadelphia, where Younger grew up, and also in the way the medicinal capsule and pharmaceutical industry has become an integral part of our daily living. Yet, there is always room for interpretation in Younger’s pieces. The capsule on the wall can also remind one of the painted pipe in Rene Magritte’s The Treachery of Images: Ceci N’est Pas Une Pipe (This is not a pipe). Perhaps this is not a capsule.
These many layers in seeing the work are also prevalent in the general relativity between the large wall sculpture and the round floor piece The overwhelming sense of color that literally comes off the wall by way of multiple spray painted leaning panels of mdf board could be read from left to right like books in a modern book case. Standing closer to it, one might feel the beauty of being surrounded by a forest in dappled sunlight and all that lives there.
The round shape of the floor piece Wheel of Art creates its own space and simultaneously directs the eye of the spectator to the colorful wall, Leaning Bypass, in the distance..
Could it also be a compass of sorts, leading the artist and us into new uncharted territories of his art making?
To paraphrase Robert Younger: it is always about starting with or without reason and making it work.
— Pieter and Abby Heijnen
Preview the Exhibition
(CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE)
