Tony Robbin

Tony Robbin, born in 1943 in Washington, D.C., is an American painter, sculptor, author, and computer artist. He spent his childhood in Japan and Okinawa and his early teenage years in Iran, where his family’s collection of Persian carpets and visits to Islamic architectural sites shaped his lifelong attention to pattern and space. After moving to New York in the late 1960s, he studied painting and developed an intellectual interest in mathematics and physics, disciplines that would later guide his approach to visualizing space. He lives and works between Gilboa and New York City.

At the center of Robbin’s practice is a sustained inquiry into how pattern and mathematics can expand the way space is perceived. In the 1970s he layered sprayed color through stencils to create optical fields of overlapping planes, aligning with the Pattern and Decoration movement’s embrace of ornament and global sources. By the end of that decade he was writing computer programs to visualize four-dimensional geometry, incorporating these structures into paintings, welded steel sculptures, light installations, and digital prints. He described this strategy as placing “many spaces in the same space,” a principle drawn from both Einstein’s writing on relativity and his own experience of multiple cultural worlds. His works explore the paradoxes of projection, presenting braided hyperplanes, lattices, and quasicrystal forms that appear to pass over and under each other in ways that suggest dimensions beyond what is visible.

Robbin has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad, with his work presented in solo shows, group exhibitions, and major retrospectives. His role in the Pattern and Decoration movement has been acknowledged in survey exhibitions such as With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 and Pattern, Crime & Decoration, which reexamined the movement from a contemporary perspective. Alongside his studio practice, Robbin has written on higher-dimensional geometry and its role in art and architecture, publishing books and articles that link projective geometry to physics and visual culture. He has presented this work in lectures at universities, museums, and professional societies in the United States, Europe, and Japan, addressing audiences from arts and sciences.