JAMES ROBINSON – Witches’ Song – 14 March–6 April, 2023
James Robinson is an expressionist artist assosiated with a generation of painters in New Zealand that gained national prominence in the early 2000’s
Robinson says that the paintings in Witches’ Song are experimental free-hanging works that, although individual, oscillate against one another, putting their secret pieces together, and as with most of my practice, it is some kind of internal sequence of events. I do make pictures… and I don’t deliberately make them.
“Rather, I make them fall apart and then I reintergrate them and they do this performance. It is an unconscious thing. My stuff is quite busy but the text on my paintings is in whispered narratives.”
Exerpts from Feature in Art Beat – Metropol by Warren Feeney
(The exhibition title is from a Marianne Faithful song, which James Robinson’s mother used to play receptively when he was a boy. Listen to it on youtube: WITCHES’ SONG)
. 
____________________________________________________________________
James Robinson was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1972 and currently lives in Port Chalmers, Dunedin. He completed a Bachelor Of Fine Arts, Otago School of Fine Arts in 2000, Diploma In Art And Craft, Hungry Creek School of Art and Craft, 1996 and Foundation In Fine Art, Nelson Polytechnic, 1990.
Robinson has exhibited regularly in private and public galleries both nationally and internationally. In 2007 he was awarded the prestigious Wallace Art residency in New York. In 2008 he was artist in residence at McCahon House Titirangi and was resident artist at Tylee Cottage, Whanganui later the same year. In 2019 he won People’s Choice award at the Parkin Award exhibition in Wellington with a In and Out, a large work from his Pyramid series. His work is urgently thoughtful, honest and direct. This is particularly evident in his drawings. Through creative exploration of materials he maps the territory of his psyche.
James Robinson’s work is held in numerous public, private and corporate collections throughout New Zealand and Australia such as James Wallace Trust Collection, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna O Waiwhetu, Eastern Southland Gallery, Ashburton Art Gallery, Te Manawa Museum, Otago University and New Contemporaries collection, Sydney.
Exhibitions at PG gallery192:
Witches’ Song, 2023
EDGELAND, 2020
Rock Action, 2017
Anthropocene and Asylum, 2015
Majic Defends Itself – artist talk
Video about James Robinson’s practice, 2017
David Eggleton poetry with mural OLD BRAIN 3
____________________________________
For more information about James Robinson:
www.jamesrobinson.nz