Robert Egert was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1958 and studied painting at Pratt Institute. He later obtained a graduate degree from City University Graduate Center with a focus on critical theory.

Robert began exhibiting his painting in New York in the 1980s with his first solo exhibition at White Columns gallery. Shortly thereafter he joined Civilian Warfare, one of the galleries that launched the emerging East Village art scene.

His solo show there of large scale oil paintings led to participation in numerous exhibitions at both emerging and established venues that included Gracie Mansion, Jack Tilton, and Holly Solomon.

Even as neo-expressionism emerged as a dominant style, Egert always followed a unique course. As writer Laura Padgett wrote,

“Years before artists like Neo Rauch appeared on the scene, Robert Egert was making paintings that collaged the mundane with the historical in a mix that said something about contemporary politics.“

In the early 1990s, Egert moved his studio to the then pioneering art community of Williamsburg, Brooklyn where he helped convert abandoned buildings into artists’ space and participated in the Immersionist art events that brought abandoned warehouses and piers to life.

Most recently, his work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Ethan Pettit Contemporary Art, Fred Valentine Gallery, and the Rockland Center for the Arts, all in New York.

Egert’s latest works are inspired by science, economics, and social systems and infused with historical references.

Of his recent work critic William Allen wrote in WG Magazine,

“… full of magma energy, wit, and speculations on the body, on science, on nature mimicking art. His images are Darwin’s dreams, Philip Guston’s party-jokes, or Frida Kahlo’s sighs of grief.”
And in the essay Ideogram and Morphism, Ethan Pettit writes,

“They are finely tuned to currents of thought that run through conceptual art and information theory. The paintings are readable from several angles, and they rise to every part of the requirement.”

Robert Egert currently works and resides in the New York metropolitan area. His paintings and works on paper are held in private and institutional collections in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Indianapolis and Dusseldorf.