Originally from Edinburgh, studying at Carlisle and Exeter art colleges, 1978-1982 Iain Robertson relocated with his partner the artist Clare Wardman from Edinburgh to live and work in St Ives, Cornwall in 1999, they have shared Studio 7 at the historic Porthmeor studios since 2007.
This exhibition comprises of recent paintings and prints made with master Printmaker Kip Gresham as part of a two-site display, in collaboration with Loweworks, Faversham where Robertson is showing key works from early in his career to the present day.
Essentially an abstract painter the layering of image and gesture, a more translucent colour contrasted with thicker impasto, surprising and unexpected happenings are balanced with a need for structure, composition, and beauty. An immediacy and the dynamic of the purely abstract, obviating a need for finish in favour of physicality, sensation, and the pleasure of materiality, pouring, gravity, mark making and a tension implicit through the coexistence of considered action and chance help Robertson to get closer to dealing with a multiplicity of information and the influence of visual and audible stimulus on the process.
Robertson has exhibited nationally and internationally most notably, Contemporary Abstract Printmaking, , Clifford Chance Canary Wharf , London, (2017) , Abstract Critical Newcomers Award (exhibiting/selector), Kings Place Gallery, London, (2012), Art Now Cornwall, TATE St Ives, (2007), PASKE, Galerie Moderne Silkeborg, Denmark, including artists Karel Appel, Georg Baselitz, Asger Jorn, (1996-2005) NEW WORK, Galerie Moderne Silkeborg, Denmark, solo (1995), NEW WORK Talbot Rice Gallery University of Edinburgh, solo, (1992)