Rob Anderson is a master realist with a remarkable ability to capture human emotion through his drawings and paintings. His compelling attention to detail, composition, value, color and delicately rendered surfaces demonstrates a vision that is both unique to his perspective and universal to the human condition.
Inspired by an exhibition at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, Rob has created a series of drawings depicting the Great Frieze of the Pergamon Altar, now in Berlin, Germany. He was commissioned to paint the images on a room-size mural for a private residence in San Francisco. The project evolved into an exhibition at the Pergamon Museum, with the subsequent publication of a folio of six of the drawings by Verlag Philipp von Zabern.
Rob created the iconic poster for the 1982 Gay Olympic Games, now called the Gay Games, which ingeniously adapted classical Greek vase painting forms into a contemporary athletic symbol. In addition to his work in drawing, painting and print, Rob is also working on a multi-media installation, Rattlesnake in a Moving Car: Life with HIV, combining portraits, audio and sculpture to explore the lives of twenty long-time HIV-positive survivors.
Rob is widely sought after for commissions and his artwork is in prestigious collections, including the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles, California and the San Francisco public collections of the Fine Arts Museums: the Achenbach Foundation and the Public Library Gay and Lesbian History Archives. His public commissioned portraits hang in San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral, as well as at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
