Robbie Campbell
Degree: MFA Sculpture
University: Slade School of Fine Art
Graduation Year: 2022
New Blood Art Commentary
Selected RSA and Bloomberg New Contemporary, in compositional and narrative snippets Robbie Campbells’ paintings register both fatigue and a renewed delight in the exigencies of contemporary existence. With titles funny and obscure, the obvious and unobvious pull at each other in these works, stretching the depicted scenes into the emptiness both of desolation and of potentiality. The skewed geographic colours of these unusual landscapes take on a levity: the boxed off scenes floating above, the brushwork floating on the canvas.
The banal but also epic migration of minor figures across these landscapes could be the tone of the half-hearted marketisation of one’s self and experience, it could be the reaching of a limit. The pictorial representation shatters, the shards reassemble into something new, if not something whole. In the artist's painterly milieus of questing and derivative forms of representation, authenticity can be a trap, inadequacy can be more interesting. The strange and the wonderful are cause and effect of the restlessness that marks these paintings, reanimating their stagnation.
Artist Statement
Encompassing moving image, audio, creative writing, painting and sculptural installation my practice stretches across many different forms and thresholds. My work is an attempt to articulate those meeting points, moments lost in translation or misremembered, what happens when an oversaturated experience of life overdoses on information so that it melds and transfuses into something new, awkward and bizarre. Through writing and painting I’m interested when the forms of description are skewed, saccharine and bitterness getting confused, the abject taking the place of the sublime. Tragicomedy and the bathetic are recurring themes, replicas, impersonators, football mascots, second hand experiences, themed hotel rooms, all these moments and objects filter through my work, whether through painting or video the slip ups on the path to aspiration interest me. The idea of sincerity in art and life, to present yourself in a packable form, there is something empathetic in objects or acts that reject this authenticity. My work aims to meet the viewer in a state of open potentiality, with the overlap between different methods of production pushing and pulling against each other constantly.
Competitions, Prizes & Awards
(2017) RSA New Contemporaries
(2017) Bloomberg New Contemporaries