Robin Richmond, Living Landscape

About

Curwen Gallery is delighted to celebrate its twenty year-long creative association with Robin Richmond by an exhibition of new work and the publication of a stunning new book, entitled "Living Landscape". 

This is the first book published of Robin Richmond’s work, and contains a revelatory essay by the artist, a section devoted to work from the last five decades, along with all her new work which will feature in a major exhibition during March. This, Richmond’s 11th one-woman exhibition with Curwen Gallery, will contain over one hundred paintings from a very productive last two years.

The title of the exhibition and of the accompanying book, is deliberately ambiguous, referring both to the experience of observing the living landscape, and living the landscape as an artist in her work. 

Over the last two years, Robin's work has developed a new formal freedom and it can now no longer be described as being either fully abstract or fully figurative - rather occupying a fertile place where neither reductive term applies. The paintings embrace accident and chance in their increasing emotional and technical fluidity and as she says herself, " It is not a matter of making the painting, but finding the painting. It is drawing out not drawing on."

This collection of wonderfully atmospheric paintings allows the viewer a window into diverse landscapes ranging from the desert plains and mesas of the American Southwest; the wild seas of the Atlantic; the dying sunsets on the Venetian lagoon; the slate mines of Cumbria; the rivers of rural France; and the strange geologies of the Corsican calanches. Richmond’s obsession with the transient effects of light and weather upon these landscapes is a recurring and captivating force within the work. Always a committed, eloquent and brilliant colourist, the new paintings combine Richmond's lyrical control of her medium with a passionate commitment to her subject, the living landscape.