Robert Standish was born in Los Angeles in 1964 and spent decades building a name in photorealistic urban scenes before doing something few established painters attempt: in 2010, he walked away from it entirely and moved into abstraction. The work that followed was strong enough that LA Weekly coined a term for it, "Transcendent Expressionism," bold, textured, saturated with color, and unmistakably his own.
Drawing from Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting, Standish's canvases move between cosmic and organic forms, less concerned with depicting a subject than with creating a feeling. His work is held in major collections including LACMA, the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, and JP Morgan Chase.
Still based in Los Angeles, Standish continues to work at the edge of abstraction, depth, movement, and intensity built directly into the paint.
