Rob de Oude: Rhyme and Repeat

Fri, Apr 4 - Sun, May 11  2025

McKenzie Fine Art, 55 Orchard Street, New York

This will be Rob de Oude's third solo exhibition with the gallery.

McKenzie Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent abstract paintings by Rob de Oude, in his third solo outing with the gallery. The exhibition will open on Friday, April 4, and will run through Sunday, May 11, 2025. Gallery hours are Wednesday – Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; on Sunday the gallery opens at noon. Mondays and Tuesdays are open by appointment.

Rob de Oude creates his signature geometric oil paintings through a process of repeating and overlapping bands of color in a patterned grid formation. The artist works predominately in square formats of varying size, ranging from 12 to 72 inches, although there are triangular and rectangular panels included in this exhibition.

Never computer generated, his paintings are carefully crafted entirely by hand on a specially designed easel with a movable guide bar. The bar allows him to keep his lines of color uniform and evenly spaced during the slow, deliberate, cumulative painting process. De Oude modulates his color choices as well as their translucency and opacity with careful mixtures and varying densities of application. The color modulation and linear shifts allow de Oude to create paintings possessing a remarkably atmospheric quality of light, at times ethereal and diffuse, with bending and shifting spatial movement, exhibiting beautiful internal rhythms and patterns.

As de Oude notes:

Several of the new paintings are based on the idea of “balance and off-balance,” often within the same work, where lines fan out and return to parallels, creating the optical appearance of bends within a straight-lined framework. The colors in much of the new work have comparatively higher contrast, with overlapping line sequences that alternate between mixing a light color with a hue and then a hue with a dark, often with the interplay of warm and cold colors on perpendicular axes. Although seemingly predetermined, there is significant intuitive decision making with the process…This balance between intent and surrender, between holding on and letting go, mirrors the dynamic that defines life itself, where structure and spontaneity coexist and inform each other.

Rob de Oude (b. 1970, Den Helder, Netherlands) studied painting, sculpture, and art history at the Hoge School voor de Kunsten in Amsterdam and attended graduate school at SUNY Purchase, NY. He settled permanently in New York in 1997, and his paintings have been exhibited widely in group and solo exhibitions in museums and galleries in the United States and Europe for the past thirty years. De Oude’s work has been featured in ARTnews, The New Criterion, Artnet, and L Magazine, among others. The artist maintains studios in Ridgewood and Andes, New York.