Lorna Robertson was born in Ayr on the west coast of Scotland in 1967. She studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee and currently lives and works in Glasgow. Her densely coloured paintings, often made with a combination of oil paint and collage, have a distinctly nostalgic tone; shimmering female forms with swinging skirts from the 1950’s or bonneted bathers from the 1920’s jostle with richly described interiors; and crowded table- tops.
"My paintings" she says "sit somewhere between abstraction and figuration, a tangled game of hide- and-seek that plays with the visibility and readability of an image. I often paint to find out what to paint, creating harmonies and tensions through placement of shape, specificity of colour - the process itself becoming an act of revealing”.
The characters in her work are at once deeply evocative, and yet strangely anonymous. They conjure an unreliable sense of time and place, flitting between decades and moods from one moment to the next. Hints and glimpses of something tangible - a fashion model, for example, or a vase of flowers, appear and then fragment into painterly patterns and explosions of colour.
Ingleby presented a solo exhibition of work by Robertson at The Armory Show, 2023 which was singled out by New York Times as a highlight of the fair. To quote:
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