Robert Cottingham — À propos — Slash Paris

Robert Cottingham is a painter best known for his Photorealist depictions of cropped commercial signage. Cottingham studied at Pratt Institute, where he received his BFA in 1963 before starting a five-year career in commercial advertising. Upon moving to Los Angeles Cottingham seriously committed himself to his own painting practice, which eventually subsumed his advertising career by 1968 as the artist rose to prominence along with the Photorealist movement.

He moved to London in 1972 and returned to the United States in 1976 after running out of photographs—the primary visual material he uses in his paintings.

Notably—though Cottingham is considered among the 13 most prominent Photorealists of the latter half of the 20th century—he disavowed his relationship to the movement. Instead, he views his own work as part of the lineage of vernacular Americana painters, including the likes of Stuart Davis and Edward Hopper. His work can be found among the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., among others.