David Shrobe

David Shrobe creates multi-layered portraits and assemblage paintings made in part from everyday materials that he finds in multiple geographies. He disassembles furniture, especially from his familial home in Harlem, separating wood from fabric and recombines them as supports for collage, painting, and drawing. Through these various modes of production, his work brings notions of identity, history, and memory into question while challenging conventions of classical portraiture. Shrobe produces new narratives, fragmented and nonlinear, that feel intimate and personal without being anchored to a specific time or place.

Shrobe (b.1974, Harlem, NY) holds an MFA (2013) and BFA (2009) in painting from Hunter College. He is an alum of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014) and was a Joan Mitchell Artist Teaching Fellow. Shrobe has had solo exhibitions at Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago; Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles; Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York; and Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco. His work is included in the traveling group exhibition Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage which opened at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville TN in 2023 and will travel to the MFA Houston, TX, and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C in 2024. Other group exhibitions include Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; CFHILL Art Space, Stockholm, Sweden; Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, and New York, NY; the Bronx Museum, Bronx, NY; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.