LOS ANGELES, CA.- Throughout his over three-decade career, Roxy Paine's work has explored the simultaneity of industry and nature, control and chaos, and form and theory. Paine’s works are discourses on the collision of conflicting impulses of information. The artist describes his work as a translation between disparate realms of data and knowledge, testing principles of human potential, rigor, and chance. The idiosyncrasy of his work lies in Paine’s sculpture-making process, where the physical object and conceptual idea are equivalent forces of rumination.

His series titled Dendroids began as an early tree-like form in Bluff, exhibited in Central Park’s Whitney Biennial 2002 and evolved into the unusual and innovative, neural, and synaptic systems of Maelstrom exhibited on the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 2009. Paine’s interest in stainless steel derives from its institutional use in pharmaceutical, food, gas, and oil pipeline industries. These visually remarkable sculptures impose upon their surroundings while often also exemplifying them. The Dendroids began as a study of growth patterns in nature and developed into Paine’s interest in structures of the human brain and nervous system.




Roxy Paine was born in 1966 in New York. His work has been exhibited internationally and is included in collections such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA, Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

Roxy Paine’s works are discourses on the collision of conflicting impulses of information such as industry and nature, control and chaos, and form and theory.

In 1990, Paine began showing his work in Williamsburg, Brooklyn where he co-founded the artist collective Brand Name Damages. In the early '90s, he quickly established a unique vision juxtaposing two conflicting impulses: the constraints imposed by data and code systems against the randomness of nature and chance. The simultaneity of industry and nature can be seen in Paine’s stainless steel Dendroids. The Dendroids, defined as anything branching or dendritic in structure, began as an early tree-like form in Bluff, exhibited in Central Park’s Whitney Biennial 2002, and evolved into the groundbreaking, neural and synaptic systems of Maelstrom exhibited on the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 2009. Paine’s interest in stainless steel derives from its institutional use in pharmaceutical, food, gas, and oil pipeline industries. The Dendroids began as a study of growth patterns in nature and developed into Paine’s recent interest in structures of the human brain and nervous system. This transformation can be seen in such works as One Hundred Foot Line, Neuron and Ferment.

Paine works and lives in Montana and Wyoming. He has held solo exhibitions in museums and institutions around the world, including Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor, Beeler Gallery, Columbus College of Art & Design, Columbus, OH (2016); Natura Naturans, Villa Panza, Varese, Italy (2015); Scumaks and Dendroids, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO (2011); Roxy Paine, WANAS Foundation, Knislinge, Sweden (2010); On the Roof: Maelstrom, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC (2009); Roxy Paine, Madison Square Park, New York, NY (2009); PMU, curated by Bruce Guenther, Portland Museum of Art, Portland, OR (2006); Defunct, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO (2004), and Roxy Paine: Second Nature, curated by Joseph Ketner and Lynn Herbert, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA. Traveled to Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; SITE Santa Fe, NM; De Pont Foundation for Contemporary Art, Tilburg, NL; James Cohan Gallery, New York, NY. He has been included in group exhibitions such as Useless Machines for Dreaming, Thinking and Seeing, Bronx Museum of the Arts, NYC (2019); In the Open, Western Gallery, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA (2017); Audacious: Contemporary Artists Speak Out, Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO (2017); 20 Years / 20 Shows, SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM (2015); Graphicstudio: Uncommon Practice at USF, Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL (2014); Out of Hand, Museum of Art and Design, New York, NY (2014); Out of the Ordinary, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (2013); Lifelike, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (2012); Color in Flux, Westerburg Museum fur modern Kunst, Bermen, DE (2011); 17th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, Australia (2010), and Bizarre Perfection, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Isreal (2008). Paine's work is included in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle Art Museum, WA; Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA, among others.