The Collection

David Shrobe creates multi-layered portraits and assemblage paintings made in part from everyday materials sourced from multiple geographies, especially around his familial home in Harlem. He disassembles furniture, separating wood from fabric, and recombines the parts as supports for collage, painting, and drawing. Materials as varied as stained glass, velvet, and bookbinding cloth appear throughout his work, and many of his oval-shaped portraits recall classical portraiture reimagined for the present day.

Through these layered modes of production, Shrobe's work brings notions of identity, history, and memory into question while challenging the conventions of traditional portraiture. His fragmented, nonlinear narratives feel intimate and personal without being anchored to a specific time or place, addressing themes of racial identity and Blackness through materiality itself.

Shrobe holds an MFA and BFA in painting from Hunter College and is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has had solo exhibitions at moniquemeloche, Chicago; Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles; Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York; and Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco, and has exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Jeffrey Deitch Gallery. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Birmingham Museum of Art, and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, among others. Shrobe lives and works in New York City.