Dario Robleto: Love, Before There Was Love
Summary
An exhibition of Dario Robleto's prints of heart pulse waves, merging science and art to reflect on life, memory, and empathy.
Description
- Dario Robleto: Love, Before There Was Love
- Glassell Gallery; September 5-October 11, 2026
- Reception: Thursday, October 8, 6-8 p.m.
On view at Glassell Gallery, Dario Robleto's work emerges poetic and scientific, material and immaterial, heart and mind. His prints of heart pulse waves ask us to engage with intimate, yet anonymous traces of sensation, memory, grief, life, and death.
Inspired b y the universal resonance of the pulse wave, Robleto researched and gathered fifty pulse waves from various libraries and archives to document life from birth to death. The portfolio ‘The First Time, the Heart (A Portrait of Life 1854-1913)' compiles the first successful scientific visualizations of the fundamental rhythm of life through heart pulse waves; each example was likely the first time a heart was recorded undergoing that experience.
For Robleto, the different lives and experiences represented in each wave evoke, a familiar, if not universal, experience that invites empathy. By witnessing and deeply reflecting on the experience represented in each wave, viewers can enact reciprocity for these traces gifted to us in the form of heart pulse waves.
About the Artist
Dario Robleto was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1972. He received his BFA from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 1997. He lives and works in Houston, Texas.
Robleto's work has been widely exhibited and is held in prominent collections, including the Menil Collection, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Since 1997, he has had numerous solo exhibitions, most recently at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (2024), the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (2024), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2019), Menil Collection (2014), the Baltimore Museum of Art (2014), the New Orleans Museum of Art (2012), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (2011). In 2008, a ten-year survey exhibition, Alloy of Love, was organized by the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York. In 2023, a second ten-year survey show, The Heart's Knowledge: Science and Empathy in the Art of Dario Robleto, was organized by the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. A major monograph accompanied each exhibition.
