Interview

Over more than five decades, Francine Tint has created a remarkable body of work. Her paintings display an exhilarating freedom of execution combined with an original and frequently surprising color sensibility, varying in size from 10 inches to nearly 20 feet. Her brushwork ranges from languorous and undulating swaths of paint to aggressive and agitated gestures. Her works speak of a powerful and unwavering commitment to the visual and emotional vocabulary of abstract painting, and they embody the artist’s personal and deeply held belief in the power of intuitive creation. ​

Tint’s direct heritage may be traced to Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting. Her admiration for those artists is enormous, but she also reaches more deeply into art history. Artists who are touchstones for Tint include Édouard Manet, Francisco Goya, Pompeian frescoes from the Roman Empire, and especially J.M.W Turner for his reliance on inspiration and radical painting techniques. She is particularly fond of 16th-century Mannerist painters; Jacopo Pontormo’s idiosyncratic colors and anatomical and spatial distortions fascinate Tint. She also has a deep interest in Asian brush paintings. Recently, Tint has been mining her books on paleolithic cave paintings where she is captivated by their creators’ profound identification with the animals they depicted, an identification which extends to handprints stenciled directly onto the cave walls. She is reminded of the foot and handprints that appear in her paintings. ​

Tint’s work has been exhibited in over thirty solo shows in the United States and Europe, and is in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Clement Greenberg collection at the Portland Art Museum and the Krannert Art Museum in Chicago. Her work is in private and corporate collections including Pepsi Co. and Mount Sinai Hospital.

Robin Kid (b. 1991), is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist from Dutch descent. Raised by his grand parents in a post war little mining town in the rural south of Holland, Robin had difficulties fitting in at school and preferred to rush home to find his refuge in front of the American programs on TV.

From re-runs of Davy Crocket, music videos on MTV to explosive fights on Jerry Springer and the commercials in between, Robin was mesmerized by the spectacle and power of American consumerism.

After dropping out of high school and a short-lived career at Mc Donalds, he decided he would teach himself to paint and sculpt through YouTube as a way to navigate today’s world by drawing on the one of his childhood. His work hijacks a variety of social, political and traditional imagery of the past and present, with rebellious, religious, fantastical and in some ways offensive undertones. He pulls intuitively from the world of advertising, the Internet, the entertainment industry and his childhood memories, to produce ambitious, enigmatic and thought-provoking narratives, which question our polarized world of the 21st century.

In parallel, Robin Kid’s solo exhibition The Future Is Old is on view at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art MOCO in Barcelona following his three-year solo exhibition at MOCO Amsterdam, and his monumental sculpture The State We Are In, In The Consciousness Of A Country’s Empty Mind as well as four paintings by the artist are on view at the Twenty-First Century Museum 21C in Louisville as part of the group exhibition This We Believe after its three-year exhibition at the 21C Museum in Chicago. ROBIN KID works are part of public, corporate and private collections in Switzerland, France, Netherlands, Spain, Germany, China, South Korea, the UK and the USA.