Artists

Lorna Robertson

Press release

A painting is a kind of space where you can stay. Somewhere you can go, similar to a piece of music… Paintings take away the weight of words. I enjoy the silence of paintings. I want them to be open…

– Lorna Robertson interviewed by Natalie Whittle, ‘The late-bloom success of Lorna Robertson and Andrew Cranston’, Financial Times, 2024

Alison Jacques presents a solo exhibition of new work by Lorna Robertson (b.1967, lives and works in Glasgow). Her first solo show in London includes new paintings made with a combination of oil paint, watercolour, collage and linseed oil on canvas and paper. These paintings sit somewhere between abstraction and figuration, as Robertson describes, ‘a tangled game of hide-and-seek that plays with the visibility and readability of an image’.

This new body of work reveals an intuitive approach to Robertson’s painterly language; larger, with a freedom of mark making rooted in improvisation, playing upon memory and layers of time. Cupboards and shelves in her studio are awash with clippings from vintage magazines and fashion photography, as well as scraps and samples of patterns and textiles. Robertson applies these ‘fragments of memories’ to canvas, juxtaposing them against ethereal colours and abstracted forms. ‘Collage gives me a tension… Something to play against, a sharp note against a soft note… Collage can give a graphic sharpness, a printed mark as opposed to a painted one, and I’m interested in the tension this can create’. The resulting paintings and works on paper operate on the cusp of nostalgia, memory and fantastical narratives which contain no beginning, end or certainty.