Robert Mihaly's work spans a range of disciplines: installations, sculpture, painting and drawing. Mihaly’s work is a collision of technical virtuosity and conceptual art.
Physically, Mihaly’s 'traditional' work has been informed by art from Hellenistic Greece to the Italian Renaissance. He has carved tractor-trailer loads of limestone and marble into elaborate olde-world figures, fountains, etc.
His gallery works are wide-ranging, yet mostly extravagant. Mihaly’s skills are prodigious, yet his intent is not to be measured by them. Mihaly states, “To judge my work by physical craftsmanship would be like judging Shakespeare by his penmanship.”
Several of Mihaly’s works illustrate this. For example, Introspecs (2009) is a pair of sunglasses mounted on a wall with the backside of the lens facing the viewer and covered with mirrored reflective tape. In works such as this, the idea of the work is more important than the object itself.
A quick glance at his oeuvre may suggest a mixture of the craftsmanly and conceptual. However, the reality is more subtle. Although many are masterfully carved, gilt or painted, all the works are conceptual.
Running through Mihaly’s art are questions of what is art and to what extent do ideas in art matter. Mihaly’s work functions as social and philosophical inquiry. He claims the ideas are his medium.
In the mid-20th century the Pure Formalist conception of art was transcendent. This is the idea that contemporary art is only about pure abstract form. The Artist is to carve or slosh paint, but never to suggest anything so base as intended meaning. The creepiest aspect of this understanding of art is that it was secretly pushed by some of the most powerful individuals in the Western world, and also agencies such as the CIA through its fronts like the Congress for Cultural Freedom and many secretly CIA-owned media organizations.
Mihaly’s work is the antithesis of this. While it is generally grandly, ostentatiously representational in some fashion, the Meaning of each work is its central feature. Mihaly's work reflects passions of idealism and rationality. In these regards his works are more true to the Renaissance than even pieces that superficially favor such periods.
In the tradition of conceptual artists such as Sol Lewitt and Joseph Kosuth, documentation is integral to many of Mihaly's works. The text can appear in paintings, carved into frames or as expanded wall text.
Mihaly’s boundless energy and inventiveness produce a stream of visually appealing and arresting work. His works posit fundamental questions underlying the most basic acts, assumptions and beliefs.
By marble, oil paints and unconventional media such as depleted uranium and human bones, Mihaly’s work demands deeper consideration of questions understood to be settled by even the most thoughtful viewer.
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