"Making a big painting is a bit like dancing or something, you've got to feel relaxed and trust that you’ll find the rhythm and that your coordination to do it is going to work...You think you're not going to manage, but it turns out you can do it. Somehow it is there in your head, and you can work on different parts of the canvas and draw all the bits together."
- Lorna Robertson
This summer Ingleby presents an exhibition of new paintings by Glasgow based Lorna Robertson. It will be her first solo show at the gallery and promises to reveal the remarkable range and energy of her work across scale and subject, combining monumental canvases with tiny fragments. Robertson's gestural, expressive, and yet finely wrought way of painting leads her into a world of densely coloured and worked images which, as she has said herself “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 results are curiously hard to pin down - an enormous canvas can contain a quiet intensity and intimacy that ought to be impossible on such a scale and a tiny collage might seem poised to explode with potential energy. There is often an undertone of nostalgia, and a conjuring of time and space that seems both specific and unreliable. They are paintings that resist easy categorisation, seductive in one moment, and obstructive in another - seemingly bold, and yet simultaneously hesitant - if they are about anything, in a collective sense, they are a celebration of the act and process of painting and image making.
