Berthold Pott Gallery is pleased to present A Trip To The Coast, the third solo exhibition by American artist Eva Robarts, opening on September 4, 2026, as part of DC Open.
Bringing together new works from Robarts’ ongoing Weavings series alongside paintings, drawings, and a video work presented publicly for the first time, A Trip To The Coast offers an insight into a sculptural practice that explores the intersections of materiality, memory, and transformation.
Robarts begins with the city itself. Walking through New York, Miami, and other urban environments, she collects objects that have been abandoned or discarded—bicycles, sections of fencing, balls, broom handles, and materials salvaged from house clearances and renovation sites. These remnants of everyday life, stripped of their original function, bear witness to the continuous circulation of materials through the urban landscape.
Rather than treating these objects as readymades, Robarts approaches them as materials carrying their own histories and physical agency. In the studio, they undergo an open-ended process of dismantling, cutting, tensioning, weaving, and reassembly. The resulting works emerge through an ongoing dialogue with the material itself, balancing structure and improvisation, order and contingency, fragility and resilience.
At the heart of the exhibition are new works from the Weavings series. Constructed from discarded broom handles, these relief-like wall pieces recall woven textiles, architectural grids, and linear drawings while remaining firmly rooted in sculpture. Here, weaving is understood not as a textile technique but as a sculptural method through which surface, volume, and space become inseparable.
The broom handles—primarily made of metal and plastic—retain the visible traces of their previous lives. Bent forms, rust, chipped paint, and signs of wear are neither repaired nor concealed but become essential components of each composition. Rather than overcoming the resistance of the material, Robarts works with it, allowing its inherent character to shape the final form. It is within this dynamic between formal precision and material unpredictability that the works acquire their distinctive presence.
Across the Weavings, linear rhythms, dense intersections, and open passages unfold into spatial fields that oscillate between drawing, relief, and sculpture. Their visual language combines structural clarity with an improvisational sensibility, inviting viewers to follow the trajectories and tensions embedded within the material itself.
Underlying Robarts’ practice is a sustained reflection on the value, use, and circulation of objects within a culture shaped by consumption. By removing discarded materials from their original contexts and reconfiguring them into new aesthetic relationships, she shifts the terms through which they are understood. What once appeared valueless becomes a repository of material memory, while traces of use are transformed into records of time, experience, and change. Her sculptures offer both a poetic and incisive meditation on the lives of objects and on the processes through which meaning is continually produced.
The exhibition is complemented by recent paintings and drawings, in which concerns with line, structure, and spatial organization continue across the picture plane. A newly presented video work further expands the exhibition, revealing the performative dimension of Robarts’ studio process and the physical negotiations that underpin her sculptural practice.
Eva Robarts (b. 1982, Miami) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA in Sculpture from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. Her work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions, including at Kunsthalle Bremerhaven; Brooklyn Sculpture Park; Nicola Vassell, New York; The Hole, New York; Primary Projects, Miami; Post-Morrow Foundation, Brookhaven, New York; Keteleer Gallery, Antwerp; the Frédéric de Goldschmidt Collection, Brussels; and Galerie Berthold Pott, Cologne.
