Roberts’ oeuvre delves deep into the hedonistic culture of today. His drawings and sculptures reflect the deluge of media and other images that assault us daily, all rendered in Roberts’ distinctive comic strip style. He fills whole sheets with drawings of a wide range of figures including everything from cult heroes to sportsmen, from pop musicians to American politicians and from animal heads to saints. On the sculpture front, he hacks iconic figures of the recent past out of tree trunks, his rough-and-ready approach giving character to the subjects. Charlie Roberts’ imagination flits constantly between the iconographic obsessions of Pop Art, the ritualism of tribal art, the anecdotal character of comic strip culture and the earthiness of folk art. 
 
Krapp Kapp
The new installation that Charlie Roberts created for Kunsthal KAdE is a chapel-like structure in which a series of painted tableaux will tell the fictional tale of the emergence of a band called ‘Krapp Kapp’. His own studio forms the central ‘altarpiece’. It is a puzzle brimming with information about his personal life and sources of inspiration and with references to the world ‘outside’. In this installation, Roberts reveals himself as a master storyteller whose panoramic vision transports us into an amazing world of the imagination, full of references to his personal past, wider (art) history and today’s multimedia world of heroes and anti-heroes.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a specially published 24-page catalogue containing an article by documentary film maker IJsbrand van Veelen. More...

About Charlie Roberts
Roberts was born in Hutchinson, Kansas (USA). His first experience of art was at secondary school, when he and his friends produced publicity posters for their band. After attending an art class, he became – in his own words – ‘obsessed by painting’. He enrolled to study history at the University of Kansas but, after hearing a lecturer talk enthusiastically about artists and their work, later decided to leave and enrol at the Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design in Vancouver, Canada. There, he trained for two years as a painter. Roberts now lives and works in Oslo, Norway.