American conceptual artist Robert H. Cumming makes paintings, sculptures, photographs, and prints that often reference science and mechanics. Interested in “perceptual glitches” – magic tricks, paradoxes, and puns – Cumming’s work has a visual and linguistic humor, an often satirical or ironic approach that recalls the whimsy of Marcel Duchamp. Referencing engineering, science, and fantastical machinery, Cumming is perhaps best known for his photographs of mechanical concept drawings. Blurring boundaries between fiction and reality, Cumming produces scenes in which to photograph, calling attention to the artifice of images and challenging artistic conventions in photography.
Cumming has had major retrospectives at the Whitney of Contemporary Art, the Hirschhorn Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. He is the recipient of four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Artist Fellowship, Awards in the Visual Arts III from Southeast Center for Contemporary Art, and the Arist-in-Residence Exchange Program with the Japn-US Friendship Commission.