Interior Decoration: Recent Paintings by Anabel Robinson
Anabel Robinson’s paintings function like rooms—lived-in, layered, and shifting between figuration and abstraction. Her work invites a search for entry points, symbols, and hidden meanings.
By Gemma Topliss
Issue 1, Summer 2023/24
If we were to enter a painting the way we enter a room, we would first start with the door. The door of the painting may be the stretcher bar. Just as a door visually disappears behind us when we enter a room, the stretcher bar is invisible as we enter the painting. Perhaps at times there is a peripheral vision of it, but mostly it is something that recedes before it can be perceived. Psychologically, we may experience the door as the structural scaffolding that holds up the room. This is just an illusion, of course, because the room is supported by its walls. The painting’s walls are the painting’s edge, or frame. The edge of a painting is what delineates the painting from not-painting, or the rest of the world. The room itself is defined by space, an absence to be filled. This is the canvas, or painting. Interior decoration fills the room. A painting can be lived in like a room.
Related
Emily Kam Kngwarray’s art has been claimed, framed, and re-framed—by critics, curators, and institutions alike. But what remains of the singular, personal encounter with her work?
Hollywood thinks it’s exposing the art world’s grift, but it’s just another con. From Velvet Buzzsaw to Picasso Baby, cinema keeps repackaging conceptual cringe as critique—while artists play along. If contemporary art is now just another film genre, it’s a bad one.
“It is no longer my face (identification), but the face that has somehow been given to me (circumstantial possession) as stage property.” — Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh, Omnicide: Mania, Fatality, and the Future-in-Delirium
