Robert Kushner ‘s Summer Sun Lands in Paris

At Galerie Nathalie Obadia, the American painter, Robert Kushner, turns flowers, gold leaf, and Japanese paper into a quiet ode to nature’s abundance

American painter Robert Kushner opens Summer Sun: Open my Heart, his new solo exhibition at Galerie Nathalie Obadia, on September 5, 2026. The show runs through October 31 at the gallery’s Paris space, 3 rue du Cloître Saint-Merri, in the 4th arrondissement. Robert Kushner brings together twelve works made between 2019 and 2025, eleven on Japanese paper and one painting on canvas. Stems, petals, and leaves unfold across gold leaf and bold color fields. Rather than simple decoration, Robert Kushner treats these botanical forms as a way of looking closely at the world.

Who Is Robert Kushner?

Robert Kushner was not always a painter of flowers. Born in Pasadena, California, in 1949, he trained under critic Amy Goldin at the University of California, San Diego. Performance came first: food, fabric, even his own body became early material. Painting followed, and with it, a quiet revolt. Alongside Miriam Schapiro and Joyce Kozloff, Robert Kushner helped found Pattern and Decoration, trading Minimalism’s austerity for unapologetic ornament. That same defiance still runs through Summer Sun: Open my Heart.

Recognition came fast. In 1975, Robert Kushner’s work entered the Whitney Biennial, and solo shows at the Whitney and the Brooklyn Museum soon followed. His paintings now sit in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Met, and Tate. Beyond canvas, Robert Kushner has worked at monumental scale too, designing public mosaics for New York’s 77th Street subway station and the Raleigh-Durham International Airport. That range, from intimate paper works to public installations, gives real weight to the twelve pieces gathered for this new Paris show.

Extensive travels through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Japan shaped him just as much. Trace the gold leaf and handmade Japanese paper in Summer Sun: Open my Heart back far enough, and that lifelong dialogue between cultures is where it starts. Robert Kushner first joined Galerie Nathalie Obadia in 2021. Five years on, Summer Sun: Open my Heart brings him back to the same walls that once introduced his botanical world to Paris.

Inside Summer Sun: Open my Heart

Several works in Summer Sun: Open my Heart trace back to a single summer. In 2019, an invitation to participate in the Les Chemins du Sud exhibition drew Robert Kushner down to Sérignan in the south of France. That exhibition took place at the Musée régional d’art contemporain Occitanie / Pyrénées-Méditerranée. Robert Kushner set up a makeshift studio in the garage of an abandoned house, albeit one already slated for demolition. Also, wild, untended plants grew right up to the door. He later called the whole experience almost storybook. After all, it felt, he said, like a brief brush with the old romantic myth of the bohemian artist’s life. For three weeks, he drew and painted daily.

Afterward, he treated the work as a kind of diary of a summer garden in full bloom. However, Robert Kushner avoided cataloguing rare species. Instead, he focused on the humble and the overlooked: weeds, ordinary leaves, wild grasses. All things considered, he drew them with what he calls accuracy, compassion, and tenderness. That attention to the modest over the spectacular runs through the whole exhibition. Accordingly, it turns the vegetal world into a language rather than a mere subject. The result is a repertoire of forms, rhythms, and colors. Above all, it links observation directly to composition.

A Language Older Than This Summer

This is not new ground for Robert Kushner. Flowers have run through his work since the 1980s, letting him slip past the old divide between figuration and abstraction. In 1990, he created Perennial Diary, thirty-five floral portraits on Japanese paper recording a full year in his own garden. Summer Sun: Open my Heart picks up that same intimacy, but redirects it toward a landscape only briefly encountered, then carried home and reworked in his New York studio.

Robert Kushner casts his vote for washi, a handmade Japanese paper whose subtle ecru tones and organic texture infuse each piece with tactile warmth. Each sheet answers ink and paint differently, and he treats the paper almost like a creative partner in the studio rather than a passive surface. Onto it, he applies India ink with a sharpened stick, or brushes on diluted oil paint, then adds gold leaf by hand, a process that keeps both the spontaneity of a quick sketch and the discipline of a considered composition.

Gold Leaf, Well Traveled

The gold leaf deployed here carries the memory of distant pilgrimages, as his journeys spanning Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Japan forged a borderless visual vocabulary. It now sits at the crossroads of East and West. The Rinpa school, Persian miniatures, and Islamic art all surface in his work. So do motifs lifted from textile traditions. Robert Kushner absorbs these influences into a language entirely his own. In his hands, ornament becomes a channel for dialogue between cultures.

Meanwhile, his time in Occitanie fed a broader reflection. Robert Kushner was researching American painter Robert De Niro Sr., who once lived in the south of France. That research led him through Céret, Sète, and Perpignan. There, he traced the same Mediterranean light that once drew Matisse and Soutine. That geography now resonates with over fifty years of questioning. Robert Kushner has spent that time exploring the place of ornament in painting. In Summer Sun: Open my Heart, beauty becomes less an endpoint than a method. Ultimately, it becomes a way of paying attention.

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Practical information:

Summer Sun: Open my Heart runs September 5 to October 31, 2026, at Galerie Nathalie Obadia, 3 rue du Cloître Saint-Merri, Paris 4e.