Studio Sunday: Rob Pruitt
This week, let’s take a look inside the studio of Rob Pruitt. Pruitt works across a wide variety of media, to the point where he isn’t particularly associated with one artistic material. The artist currently lives and works in New York City, and has had his work shown locally and internationally.
Rob Pruitt’s studio looks very efficient, and is lit more like a warehouse or factory than an artist’s studio. Naturally the space is well-equipped for spray-painting and airbrushing. In the bottom image, the walls of the space are coated in plastic, allowing the artist to brush freely without any concern for damaging the building itself. I’d imagine there’s a constant very strong paint smell throughout the space.
The artist has more recently collaborated with clothing lines J. Crew and J Brand Jeans, creating pieces of clothing in his signature color-gradient design. The below photo shows Pruitt in the process of creating one of these works for J Brand, airbrushing color directly onto the model’s clothing to create a one-of-a-kind piece. Pruitt, like many artists of his stature, employs numerous studio assistants who aid him in producing a prolific number of artworks of all shapes and sizes.
Pruitt is something of a rock-star artist, similar to Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons. He is known for throwing huge parties and fundraisers, and his work tends to have a commercial edge to it. In one work, the artist even collaborated with his partner Jonathan Horowitz to renovate a home into an artistic haunted house, complete with taxidermy animals and tombstones in the front yard.
