John Robinson

John Robinson (b. 1981) is a British painter who lives and works in Worcester, UK. His practice is shaped by performance and by the strange authority of images already in circulation. He is drawn to material that arrives with a social, devotional, or comic charge: religious reproductions, cosmological diagrams, fragments of European painting, television images, British slapstick, and objects from domestic life. Some paintings begin directly from these found or mediated sources. Others emerge from actions staged privately, for the camera, or before an audience.

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Robinson constructs masks, costumes, and props from reproductions of paintings, domestic objects, cheap jewellery, and found images. He photographs or films himself inside these provisional figures, then rebuilds the encounter in oil. The performances are not illustrations of completed ideas but a way of generating situations in which disguise, exposure, awkwardness, and transformation can be tested.

Robinson grew up in a Christian cult in Worcester. Leaving the faith did not remove the need for belief. In his queerness, he learned to recognise himself obliquely in bodies and images not made for him. A desire to become someone or something he cannot be runs through the work: a beautiful woman, a saint, a king, or a monster. He rebuilds belief through the glamour, comedy, and familiarity of vernacular images, searching in the ordinary for a door to the divine.

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His paintings preserve what remains after these invented ceremonies. Robinson is drawn to transformations that almost work, while the body, object, or source image remains visible. Failure may be comic, painful, or ecstatic. A mask reveals rather than conceals, and a borrowed image becomes a temporary body before receding into the material fact of painting.

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Robinson studied Fine Art at Falmouth College of Arts, graduating with First Class honours in 2003, and completed an MA in Fine Art with Distinction at Central Saint Martins in 2008. While studying at Falmouth, he also worked with the painter Robert Lenkiewicz. As a recipient of the Royal Academy’s Richard Ford Award for Painting, he studied paintings at the Prado Museum and subsequently lived for an extended period in Madrid.

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His awards include the Premio de Pintura Focus-Abengoa and the Hauser & Wirth Prize. Recent solo exhibitions include People Ruin Paintings at DeNode Foundation, Ghent; The Shed at 10 & zero uno, Venice; Cuckold at Tonnheim Gallery, Madrid; and Verso, curated by Domenico de Chirico and organised by Zuecca Projects, Turin.

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His work is held in public and private collections including the Arts Council Collection, British Council Collection, Wellcome Collection, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, University of the Arts London permanent collection, Focus-Abengoa Foundation, Damien Hirst Collection, Chris Martin Collection, and Nicolas and Maxine Leslau Collection.