ROBIN RICHMOND

The Still Point of the Turning World

07 th- 31st March 2012, Private view 6th March, 6-8pm

Artist talk Thursday 15th March at 7pm

“Robin Richmond is one of the finest painters working in Britain today,” (Art Review)

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In this, her eighth one-woman show at Curwen and New Academy Gallery, Robin Richmond has

expanded her vocabulary and extended her range to capture the spirit of a skill too long eclipsed by

contemporary art – traditional easel painting. Having said this, her work is neither narrative nor

descriptive, nor transcriptive and her paintings of landscape attempt to evoke a sense of place,

rather than to define it.

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Robin Richmond, As Fragile as our Clay; Rome, from the studio window, oil, casein & acrylic on linen, 120 x 100cm

These paintings tread a very delicate threshold between figuration and abstraction, a line which she

walks with complete assurance and authority. Formal painting skills are celebrated and with the use

of antique skills such as glazing and a subtle use of layering, she creates a rare poetic atmosphere.

Like a palimpsest these images are glimpsed rather than directly seen.

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First and foremost Richmond would say she is a painter of Light. In this she is of the tradition of

Turner as much as with Rothko and the Abstract Expressionists with whom she feels a great affinity.

In her exhibition catalogue entry she writes of her work;

“It is more an evocation of a feeling; a kind of emotional weather map where physical and mental space

collide, where the “world is at our feet as fragile as our clay.”

This affectionate nod to Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is not entirely coincidental; in that Robin

was brought up in Rome and has taken a Grand Tour herself in the last two years. In a sabbatical

from her London life she has travelled widely. This show includes paintings derived from and inspired

by, long stays in the High Andes, the Amazonian rainforest, Italy, France, Scandinavia and the United

States.

Robin Richmond lives and works in London and South-West France. She is the author of 7 books,

and is a regular contributor to numerous art journals. She has work in a number of museum

collections, as well as many private and corporate collections. She attained both her Fine Art BA and

her MA in Art History at Chelsea School of Art. She has been a fellow and Artist in Residence at

Yale University, USA since 2003. Her work will be the subject of a major retrospective at the

Château D’Excideuil in August 2012.

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Robin Richmond, Swathe; Amagansett; Long Island NY, acrylic on canvas, 46 x 60cm