Ineffable Touch
Robin Dintiman

GALLERY II & III

Robin Dintiman, Thin as Our Skin: Azure Button (detail), 2022, Grown bacterial leather, pearl buttons, seed pods of lilies, African mahogany, plexi, 18 x 22 x 1 1/2 inches.

October 12 – November 10, 2024

Opening reception: Saturday, October 12, from 6–8pm

A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce Ineffable Touch, a solo exhibition by National Artist Robin Dintiman, featuring sculpture, printmaking, photography, video, and textiles. This is Dintiman’s first solo exhibition at A.I.R.

Using a combination of unique processes, Dintiman creates works that reflect the transience of our corporeal lives, blurring the boundaries between the physical world and the ineffable, the mortal and the spiritual.

The works on view in Ineffable Touch incorporate found objects from nature such as tree branches, as well as personal detritus such as shed hair, gloves, and buttons. Drawing from Dintiman’s own life, her body lines and wrinkles, they reflect the vulnerability the artist feels in her skin. The pieces are intended to inspire a similarly visceral response in the viewer, whose feeling about their own body and history will inevitably influence how they respond to the work. Dintiman’s works evoke an uneasy awareness of our very real fragility. But this awareness, the artist believes, might also allow for greater consciousness. 

“Consistent throughout all of my work is an intimate focus on what I hold to be our most complex human syntax—that of how and why things die, and of how we regard or treat them in this process of transition,” Dintiman says. “I intricately explore these thoughts through nature-based works that express how we experience the world through our bodies. It then connects us to the archetypal ‘Eros’—the life force felt in our bodies as we embrace the uncanny and the inexplicable.”

Robin Dintiman has studios in Oakland, CA, and the Hudson River Valley. Her work has been exhibited extensively around the United States and internationally. She has taught classes at California College of the Arts, Renaissance Arts School, the San Francisco Arts Foundation, Manhattan Graphics Center, Washington Irving, Gramercy Arts, HS for Art and Design, Printmaking Center of New Jersey, Twin Rivers, Contemporary Print, and various community colleges throughout the country.

Dintiman received the Da Vinci International Award in 2023. She has received fellowships from the Yaddo Corporation, Dorland Mountain Colony, Haystack School, and Cooper Union, as well as California Arts Council Grants, a Puffin Foundation Grant, and the P.B. Widner Traveling Grant. She has produced five books of her work, which can be accessed on her website: Trauma and Loss: Personal and Political; Ad Hoc Printmaking; Ashes; Materiality of Being Invisible; and Water and Dreams.

View the Press Release here.

View Robin Dintiman’s page here.