Robin Rhode
8 January – 17 February 2026
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“With his research-based and socially engaged practice, Robin Rhode (b. 1976, Cape Town, South Africa; lives and works in Berlin) engages the urban landscape to create complex, symbolically rich narratives that disrupt and transform their environments.
The artist is best known for his multi-panel works that deftly combine photography, performance, wall painting, and drawing. Negotiating the urban landscape, these photographs often depict silhouetted figures interacting with carefully composed wall paintings that the artist paints in public spaces, most often in the city of Johannesburg. In each succession of photographs, the choreographed movements of the individual or group appear to alter the two-dimensional renderings, compressing space and time and morphing the urban landscape into a fictional storyboard. Using the medium of photography to capture his painted and performative actions, Rhode disrupts the fixity of the wall, rendering it a mobile substrate that can be transported into a variety of contexts […].
Rhode studied at the University of Johannesburg as well as at the Association of Film and Dramatic Arts (AFDA), from 1996 to 2001. Select solo exhibitions of his work have been organized by the Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, the Netherlands (2021); Kunsthalle Krems, Krems an der Donau, Austria (2020); Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany (2019); Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland (2018); Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel (2017); Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2016); The Drawing Center, New York, NY (2015); Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY (2014); National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (2013); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2010); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2009); Hayward Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2008); and Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2007). Select group exhibitions featuring his work include Experiencing the Global Contemporary Metropolis, Moody Center for the Arts, Houston, TX (2022); Allied with Power: African and African Diaspora Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL (2020); Prix Pictet 2019: Hope, Victoria and Albert Museum Porter Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2019); NOW, National Galleries, Edinburgh, Scotland (2018); Art/Afrique, le nouvel atelier, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France (2017); Shifting Views: People and Politics in Contemporary African Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, MD (2016); Making Africa. A Continent of Contemporary Design, Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany and Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain (2015); Drawing Now, The Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria (2015); and Staging Action: Performance in Photography Since 1960, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2011). Rhode has participated in multiple biennials and triennials, including the Busan Biennale (2017); the 56th Venice Biennale (2015); PERFORMA 15 (2015); the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012); Yokohama Triennial (2005); and the 51st Venice Biennale (2005).”
– Text from Lehmann Maupin
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[Forthcoming]
For more than two decades, South African-born artist Robin Rhode – based in Berlin since 2002 – has explored the body as a sculptural instrument. Using walls, streets, and architectural surfaces as stages, Rhode has built a practice where movement, drawing, and photography merge into a language of embodied form. His work transforms the most ordinary surfaces into sites of performance, where the body inscribes itself into space.
Rhode’s residency at the Villa-Legodi Centre for Sculpture focused on learning particular stone-working skills through practical skills transfer, enabling the development of a new body of work that was exhibition in the project space, under the title, Robin Rhode: Body as Sculpture (2026). The new stone-related sculptures translate ephemeral bodily gestures into material permanence, compressing movement, resistance, and play into depth, surface, and weight.
The body-as-sculpture is central to Rhode’s idom, yet it has historically manifested in ephemerality: chalk lines erased by movement, photographs capturing transient gestures or videos recording playful confrontations with urban space. At the Villa-Legodi, Rhode presented a new body of work that extends this language into sculptural, painted wall reliefs. These works translate the immediacy of performance into material permanence: gestures once fleeting become etched into surface, thickened into depth, and stilled as form. The wall reliefs act as “frozen actions”, compressing the dynamism of the body into sculptural memory.
The Villa-Legodi Centre for Sculpture, dedicated to the evolving traditions of South African sculpture, provides an ideal setting for this shift. Rhode’s reliefs enter into dialogue with the site’s architectural and sculptural legacies, rooting his international practice in local histories. They affirm the wall not as background but as active register of corporeal presence, where play, struggle, and imaginatino leave enduring traces.
