NEW YORK.- Perry Rubenstein Gallery is pleased to announce that Robin Rhode will be included in the 51st International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. Rhode is the youngest of more than 40 artists selected by Venice Biennale director Maria de Corral for the exhibition "Experience of Art," to be shown in the Italian Pavilion.

Rhode's works are both performative and documentary, and bridge the low-fi and high-tech. South African-born Rhode uses crude materials like charcoal or black house paint to draw in the public realm -- on the sidewalk, in the street, on building walls -- and photographs and video tapes his performances using a stop/action style that recalls Edward Muybridge's chronophotography. In his photographic and video pieces "He Got Game" and "White Walls," Rhode turns playing basketball and jacking up a car, respectively, into temporary guerilla interventions that re-mark the original site of these urban activities. Using the subcultural codes of hip-hop, sports, film, and fashion, Rhode's provocative, high-energy pieces investigate the rapid flux of South Africa's politics, socioeconomics, and culture. His wall drawings create a dialogue between in situ marks and the urban environment as they try to transgress its physicality and literally spill out onto the streets.

In September 2004 at the inaugural opening of Perry Rubenstein Gallery in New York, Rhode performed a work entitled "Night Caller," in which he drew a telephone booth directly onto the gallery wall, while engaging the audience to participate. In his exhausting attempts to make a phone call, the artist transforms the quotidian into a humorous comment on the failure of both the conceptual notion of transgressing a two-dimensional object and the physicality of moving within a three dimensional space.

Robin Rhode was born in 1976 in Cape Town, South Africa and currently resides in Berlin. Forthcoming exhibitions include: MusÈe de Modern de la Ville de Paris (April 2005), Yokohama Triennale (September 2005), and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (Fall 2005). Past exhibitions include: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Kunsthalle, Basel; New Museum, New York; Palais de Beaux de Arts, Charleroi, Belgium; National Center for Contemporary Art, Moscow; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; and, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. Rhode's work is in numerous private and public collections including: Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; The Rose Art Center, Brandeis University, Boston; South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Johannesburg Art Gallery, South Africa; FRAC Reims, France.

The Venice Biennale celebrates its 110th year as the world's premiere exhibition of contemporary art. The 51st edition is under the direction of MarÌa de Corral and Rosa MartÌnez. The exhibition opens to the public on June 12, 2005 and remains up until November 6, 2005. For more information on La Biennale, please visit www.labiennale.org or call +39 41 52 18 846.