Robert Thiele is an influential visual artist as well as an educator and curator. Thiele’s artistic career engages with the New York School, Surrealism, Minimalism and Conceptualism. Working with simple geometric and organic shapes and forms, Thiele developed a lifelong exploration of the art of containment and covering. His sculptural paintings variously contain, reveal and conceal, recede and project. These objects house apertures that frequently blur whatever is veiled behind them, whether with the size and shape of the opening, with obscuring fabric or acrylic. The apertures hint at an image, often an abstract(ed) form, but sometimes there is a stronger suggestion of a woman or an eye. His nuanced work employs spatial play within the individual artwork and in groupings of artworks, affording a succession of curators and collaborators endless edits within his open-ended system.