Robert Russell: Stateless Objects / Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles

Robert Russell: Stateless Objects

Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA

April 5 — May 10, 2025

Stateless Objects is the fourth solo exhibition by Los Angeles artist Robert Russell at Anat Ebgi.

For the past several years Robert Russell has painted still lifes of teacups and Allach Porcelain figurines. His latest series, named Stateless Objects depict Judaica—kiddish cups, havdalah sets, challah platters—now housed in public or private collections, where Jewish communities flourished for centuries across North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia.

The dispersal of Judaica often parallels the decline of Jewish communities in these regions, driven by political upheaval, antisemitism, violence, and forced migration. In countries such as Iraq and Libya, significant Jewish artifacts have been neglected or destroyed, underscoring the fragile state of this heritage. Removed from their original domestic and ritual contexts, now immortalized and remembered in Russell’s oil paintings, Stateless Objects raises questions about cultural ownership, memory, and preservation.

The exhibition engages in a form of restoration—not a reconstruction of what was lost, but an act of conceptual repatriation. In Jewish thought human hands play a role in completing the world, in making the divine manifest. Russell’s paintings participate in this sacred act of completion, transforming scattered remnants of history into a presence that can be witnessed.

Responding to these remains, Russell has also painted porcelain vessels—teacups, pots, salt and pepper shakers—produced in Germany before the Nazi occupation, before Aryanization claimed them. These objects, once ordinary, now exist as spectral echoes of a world erased. As one approaches these canvases, the physicality of Russell’s paintings dissolves into a collection of individual marks. Isolated from background, gravity, or contextualizing narrative, the velvety voids in which they float strip everything away until all that remains is the whisper: I am here.

Together, these works explore the fragility of cultural memory and the human role in its restoration and remembrance. Just as the dispersal of Judaica reflects histories of exile and rupture, these porcelain vessels carry the weight of an erased history—objects suspended in time, painting not to restore the past, but to acknowledge it, to call it to the present. Russell’s practice is an invocation, a sanctification of what remains.

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