Ingleby are thrilled to announce that Lorna Robertson's Love and loneliness of a young mother (2023) has joined the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
"Like many of the figures painted by Glasgow artist Lorna Robertson (b. 1967), the central woman in this work calls to mind a remembered ideal of feminine freedom, chic and exuberance. With her Mary Jane heels and impassive face, she could be an illustrated figure from a 1950s fashion magazine, or perhaps a jauntily dressed mannequin in a department store window from the same period.
At the same time, the work’s title and layers of diffused colour complicate its apparent lyricism. Is the painting an image of how this mother sees herself? Of how she dreams of being? Is the fantasy real and reachable, or fugitive? Is the work’s apparent happiness in fact a kind of self-protection – a way of keeping loneliness and melancholy at bay? Like Linda Marrinon and Jenny Watson, Australian artists in the Art Gallery’s collection, Robertson discovers tenderness, compassionate humour, and emotional complexity in supposed stereotypes of femininity." - Art Gallery NSW
