Rob Pruitt is an American Postwar & Contemporary painter who was born in 1964. He is working in the Post-Pop traditions of the digital age. He is known for his embrace of commercial or found images and aesthetics, particularly as they touch his own life; it’s hard not to see the quintessentially American culture at the heart of his work. Pruitt’s approach also incorporates elements or nods to minimalism, which quickly or deftly veer off course as into spaces of play, humor, or surprise. ‘Untitled (Woman with an Ermine)’ is a great example of the role of art history, irreverence and minimalism in Pruitt’s work. The painting is a simple gradient spectrum of earth tones like a dark sunset, on top of which is a clumsily-rendered face eyes and a mouth as if drawn hastily by a computer mouse from an outdated computer rendering app. In fact, the color palette of the work is derived from DaVinci’s famed ‘Woman with an Ermine,’ and Pruitt’s intervention evokes ideas about art and representation in the digital age.
