Robert Pruit: Corpus
Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to announce Corpus, Robert Pruitt’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from September 13th through October 25th, 2025. We invite guests to join us on September 13th from 3:00 – 4:00 pm for a conversation between Robert Pruitt and Taylor Bythewood-Porter prior to the opening reception.
Pruitt’s monumental portraits depict bodies draped with exquisite, often surreal adornments, their gaze frequently obscured by layers of carefully arranged textiles, sculptural objects, trailing vines, or gravity-defying swirls of ethereal substances. The works in Corpus consider the interplay between the corporeal substance of the body and the ephemeral concept of the spirit. By overlaying historical relics, elements of the natural world, and representations of the celestial realm onto the surface of the body, Pruitt teases out their material resemblances and skillfully intertwines the earthly with the intangible.
With their sumptuous use of conté, pastel, deep tones of charcoal and coffee wash, the portraits draw attention to surprising textural parallels – draped fabric, skin, earthenware, precious metals, soil, bones, and arteries. Pruitt’s practice weaves together religious iconography, science fiction imagery, and African American perspectives on theism, transcendence and mythology. Some of the figures in this new body of work are literally buried under the weight of their strange ornamentation, while others are stripped down to their bones or their circulatory system. Despite these drastic alterations to their bodies, the sitters impart a distinctive personal style and a bold sense of embodiment and ease.
The exhibition’s titular work, Corpus, depicts a body devoid of skin, muscles, organs, and bones, its sinuous red veins forming a kind of armature for a gold chain necklace with the head of a crucified Jesus. This baring of the body in attempt to pinpoint its essence is also seen in Strip Tease, in which a skeleton wearing a gold chain jauntily flashes his bones from beneath a silk-lined fur coat. In Woman in a gown constructed from a Land Acknowledgement, an upright female figure is fully submerged within a geological cross-section of soil laden with bags of money, prehistoric creatures, bones, and artifacts. Other works nod to the art historical trope of the Madonna and child, or to the religious iconography and symbols of transience used in vanitas still life paintings. Relics from recent history, objects from antiquity, and signs of the supernatural are imprinted upon and enmeshed with the bodies that wear them. These works question what defines the core of the self by examining the dichotomies of interior and exterior, the observable and the unseen, the mundane and the surreal.
Robert Pruitt (b. 1975, Houston, TX) received his BA from Texas Southern University (2000) and an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin (2003).
His work was recently included in the traveling exhibition A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration, which began at South at the Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, and traveled to the North at the Baltimore Museum of Art (MD), and The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY. Solo exhibitions include To Control the Universe, Salon 94, New York (NY); Guest Minister at Oxbow, Seattle (WA); The Banner Project: Robert Pruitt, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MA); Robert Pruitt: Devotion, at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles (CA), among many others.
Recent group exhibitions include Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (NY); FEMMES, Curated by Pharrell Williams, Perrotin, Paris,France; Between Distance and Desire: African Perspectives, The Soloviev Foundation Gallery, New York, (NY); Us, We, Them, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester (MA); Assembly, Blanton Museum of Art, Austin (TX); Men of Steel, Women of Wonder, at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville (AR); and Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem, which traveled to the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco (CA); the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston (SC); Kalamazoo Institute of Arts (MI); Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton (MA); Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City; and the Frye Art Museum, Seattle (WA).
Pruitt’s work was also featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. His work is included in many public collections including the Dallas Museum of Art (TX); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (MA); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (NY); the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (TX); the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham (NC); the Portland Museum of Art (OR); the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (NY); the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin (TX); and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (VA), among others.