Inventing his own iconographies, Robert Ginder deploys the techniques of Old Masters to reinterpret the architecture and environs of contemporary Southern California, with all its resplendently workaday pick-up trucks and palm trees. In Phenomenon, the mundane becomes spiritual and significant through recontextualization and juxtaposition. Using Trecento elements like gold leaf backgrounds and arched or apse-like upper edges, Ginder glorifies the modest bungalows of Los Angeles, creating contemporary secular icons that border on humorous, but remain reverent. He also transforms traditional nature and still life paintings into curious scenes: jets of cosmic detritus shoot across Arts and Craft-style images of ripe grapes and blooming flowers, while flames lick at the edges of delicate still lifes, threatening their perfect florals and fruits. These subtly uncanny combinations—this “tension of opposites,” as Ginder describes it—is not unlike the sensation described by Lautréamont, as beautiful as, "the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella."
Ginder is a multimedia artist who lives and works in Las Vegas, Nevada. He uses elements of age and history to create a venerable artifact to elicit a new regard for subjects that might be seen as mundane. In this new context, the ordinary can be re-examined in a new and often more spiritual light. Ginder's work has been exhibited in many galleries and museums like Lora Schlesinger Fine Art, Charlie James Gallery, USC Fisher Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Boca Raton Museum of Art, O.K. Harris Works of Art, Quint Contemporary Art, the Timken Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.