Robot is one of a series of marionettes Alexandra Exter made in 1926 for an unrealized film. Her inventive figurines draw on revolutionary artistic developments of the 20th century, including mechanization, nontraditional art materials, assemblage and collage, and abstraction. Exter used glass for the robot’s face to play on the faculty of sight, and she made an accordion of cardboard cubes to form the chest to suggest the act of breathing. A pioneering figure in the international avant-garde working fluidly across media, Exter was a painter and designer active in Moscow and Kyiv before settling in Paris in 1924.