WA artist reflects on life's work in mid-career survey exhibition

Western Australian artist Kevin Robertson’s work will be featured in a major mid-career survey exhibition opening next month at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery. 

The exhibition highlights the development of Robertson’s painting since graduating from Curtin University in 1984 to more recent work developed for the exhibition. 

Robertson emerged as an artist when figurative painting was having a resurgence internationally and was part of a group known as the ‘Oddfellows’, who created works featuring the local urban and suburban environment. 

Image: Western Australian artist Kevin Robertson.

In the 1980s, Robertson produced a series of enigmatic images of figures in the interior and continued this theme in Sydney in the 1990s, infusing interior spaces and interactions between figures with psychological meaning and expression. 

From 2002, Robertson’s range of subject matter increased when he began to introduce a sense of movement into his works and subjects, ranging from suburban and cityscapes to landscapes and cloudscapes. 

Curator Dr Sally Quin said Robertson’s work was distinguished by its breadth and diversity, producing intimate domestic scenes, both moody and enigmatic, as well as large-scale paintings of clouds painted in real-time as they moved across the sky, viewed from his Gotham studio in Northbridge.

“Robertson is an artist who has a very sophisticated approach to painting, interested in observation, but also in what representational painting means – its limits and complexities,” Dr Quin said.

“These ideas are beautifully demonstrated in his ‘pictures within pictures’ paintings, for which he made a series of hard-edged abstract artworks to place in interior settings, which he then painted.”

Over four decades, Robertson’s painting practice continued to evolve, exploring a spectrum of aesthetic possibilities and proposing new ways of visualising the world in all its mystery. 

Kevin Robertson: Paintings 1984- 2022 will be opened by Megan Salmon — fashion designer, long-standing friend and colleague — on Friday 9 September from 6-8pm. The exhibition runs from September 10 to December 10. The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, 12pm to 5pm, and admission is free.  For more information, visit the LWAG website.