Robert Cottingham is of a generation of 20th-century painters who, in finding themselves confronted with the 19th-century rival of painting—photography, successfully assimilated photography into their work. This movement in art became known as Photo Realism. Cottingham, Malcolm Morley, Robert Bechtle, John Clemente Clark, Richard McClean, Ralph Goings and John Kacere are among the luminaries of this international style.
Cottingham, like most Photo Realists, uses the photograph as a sketchbook of his visual imagery. However, he adds his very personal framed views of the New York City he grew up in and turns his visual reporting to re-code them into a visual language where letters, words and scraps of images penetrate beyond the eyes of the viewer and lodge in the mind and heart.
Cottingham is fascinated by the power of various combinations of lettering that appear as advertisements on the streets of our community. These familiar and seemingly ordinary symbols epitomize the brash, bold American way of life and free enterprise. He successfully employs compositional devices that add interest to his urban images. His concern for formalist abstraction encourages the viewer to focus on the play of light and the passage of time through his work as he records a sympathetic detachment to the phenomena of the 20th-century urban landscape.
