Location: Los Angeles, CA (born and trained in the Bay Area)
Medium: Painting, Photography, Artist books
Website: jasonrobertsdobrin.com
Jason Roberts Dobrin was born in Berkeley, California. He earned a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005 and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 2013, and he currently works as Studio and Gallery Manager for the School of Art at CalArts in Valencia, California.
Dobrin works across painting, photography, drawing, sculpture, video, and printed matter, and has self-published more than 40 artist books, including Color Photo Book and Los Angeles Photo Book. He has held solo exhibitions at Phil Gallery, Cirrus Gallery, and Spencer Brownstone Gallery, and has shown in group exhibitions at Night Gallery, Stanley’s Gallery, The Crying Clover, Dan Graham Gallery, Granada Show Room, There There, Sebastiane Gladstone, and the AF Projects/Louise Alexander Gallery Project Space, as well as Marfa Ballroom in Texas.
Dobrin’s Bay Area training and roots continue to surface in his exhibition history: his photography was included in SFMOMA’s 2024–2025 survey “Around Group f.64: Legacies and Counterhistories in Bay Area Photography,” shown alongside Group f.64 founders Ansel Adams and Edward Weston and a roster of contemporary Bay Area photographers, and his work has also appeared in a group exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California. In spring 2025, his painting Landscape With House (2024) was shown at Personal Space, an artist-run gallery in Vallejo, as part of the group exhibition “Give Me Light.”
Dobrin is best known for heavily impasto, representational still-life paintings that layer lush, textured paint on canvas, foregrounding saturated color and broad, gestural brushwork to give the surface a sculptural, tactile quality. His subjects are deliberately banal and domestic — flowers in vases, lit cigarettes billowing smoke across the canvas, fruit in vessels — drawn from the interiors and everyday environments of his own memory, then rendered familiar-yet-obscured through improvisational mark-making that gestures toward contemporary screen-based visual culture.
Alongside painting, Dobrin maintains an active photography and publishing practice, producing black-and-white and color photographic series of landscapes, mountains, and rivers, and self-publishing dozens of artist books that circulate his photographic and painted imagery outside the gallery system.
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