DeCordova Collects Photographs: Recent Acquisitions
Robert Cottingham
Commercial signs, those monuments to consumerism which dot the urban landscape, provide the subject matter for Robert Cottingham’s Cibachrome prints. He says of them, “Commercial signs are amazing. Here are these elaborate, monumental structures designed solely to tell you that this is where you can buy a hamburger or a pack of cigarettes. You can see these signs as hilarious or pathetic. All that effort, all that pomposity just to sell you something. And yet they are an heroic attempt by someone to leave his mark.” It is not the consumer conscious content of signs which intrigue Cottingham, but their structure. In Cibachromes like Coca-Cola and Buick he isolates and emphasizes those things which typically go unnoticed such as letter forms, shapes, materials and various minor details of fabrication. His ultra realistic style and penchant for fragmentary presentation, close-ups and radical cropping, result in images that are as strange as they are familiar. Cottingham transforms signs from icons of Pop culture into ambiguous constructions of complexity and beauty. Cottingham scours the U.S. via Greyhound Bus searching for potentially remarkable signs. Primarily a painter, many of Cottingham’s photographs serve as studies for his photorealistic paintings of signs.
