Banksy Books

Meticulously painted in oil on linen and framed in a simple black-edge frame, Ian Robinson created this painting for an exhibition called “Retro Still Life” in Rivington St, London. The site has some significance since Banksy and his team of artists often exhibited on this street and Banksy murals are often found in surrounding areas, popular with graffiti art tours. The books in the painting depict the importance of the photo book genre and include the famous artwork ‘Wall and Piece’.  The photo book was sold cheaply in HMV in the 1990’s and helped to catapult Banksy’s fame.  As part of Ian’s series of paintings that focus on other artists, this still life captures his research into Banksy and is a tribute. During his research Ian considered how artists’ collections are so often captured in a portable book format, serving to increase an artist’s popularity and how huge works of art over numerous places become captured, reproduced and easily distributed to an audience.

 

Category:

Additional information

Original / Edition

Original work of art

Medium

Oil on stretched linen in frame

Size

40 x 120 cm

Date

2021

Description

Ian Robinson’s work is concerned with obsessions and the back-stories of collections.  Working mainly in still life he portrays his personal associations with these items in an attempt to capture the spirit, the soul, and the physiognomy of objects and our-selves as it is revealed through our passions.

Excerpt from A-N Review

For artist Ian Robinson, his photorealistic “portraits” of the objects of collections began when he was still at college, and he started to paint pictures of his own record collection. Upon moving to London, he suddenly found he had access to numerous other collections, including those of Sir John Soane, Cassiano Dal Pozzo, and Aby Warburg, and his focus switched from music to literature. He would visit the collections, make drawings and take photos, and then scale these up, sometimes by hand, sometimes by projecting the photograph on to the canvas, and paint them in minute detail over a period of months. The results are documents of documents, catalogues of catalogues, copies and replicas […]  Robinson is a young man, with talent and a passion for his work, and so I can only surmise that his series will continue to grow.

Ian has a First Class Ba (hons) Fine Art : Painting from University of the Arts London – Wimbledon College of Art – 2011. He is currently employed as an Artist in the studios of Patrick Hughes.

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