Opening Reception: Friday, March 14, 2008 from 6 - 9 pm
Slate Gallery proudly presents Dorothy Robinson’s Tectonics, an exhibition of new paintings inspired by landscape. Featured are five large abstract oil paintings in which the artist explores the metaphor of landscape and the langu... Read more
Opening Reception: Friday, March 14, 2008 from 6 – 9 pm
Slate Gallery proudly presents Dorothy Robinson’s Tectonics, an exhibition of new paintings inspired by landscape. Featured are five large abstract oil paintings in which the artist explores the metaphor of landscape and the language of paint. This is Robinson’s first solo exhibition in New York, and it runs from February 29 through April 6, 2008. The artist will be present at the opening on Friday, March 14, 2008 from 6 to 9 pm.
The series’ title, Tectonics, refers to the earth’s processes, such as the movement of plate tectonics and the forces of weather which shape the environment and affect human life in very profound ways. However, Robinson’s work is not based on direct observation of nature like many landscape painters. Instead through “moving mounds of paint around and scraping it off”, the artist discovers elements that remind her of landscape and which emanate from memory and experience. Robinson frequently makes her own oil paint, a time-consuming process but one which enables her to feel and observe the different textures of pigment. Her belief in the expressive possibilities of oil paint and the painting process coupled with a deep fascination with the metaphor of landscape and the earth’s processes result in dramatic landscape paintings that in the artist’s words, “twist and turn, toss around and split apart, sometimes merging into sky or water, or disappearing off the edge of a cliff.” The artist states, “I don’t wish to describe a landscape so much as meander/run/fall through it, and capture not a moment but a process—forms, elements and events, moving and changing over time.”
While earning a degree in geography from UC, Berkeley in the late 1970s, Dorothy Robinson worked in the university’s space sciences lab, where she created photographic images from satellite data. Falling in love with these brand-new images of earth and the act of making pictures led Robinson to change direction in her career, culminating in her earning an MFA in painting from UC, Berkeley in the early 1990s. After several years of showing on the West Coast and traveling abroad through awards and grants, Robinson moved to New York City in 2004 on a year long residency from the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation. She is currently an Artist-in-Residence at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in Manhattan and is a 2008 recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Award. Robinson’s work has been included in group shows in Manhattan and Williamsburg, and her exhibition at Slate Gallery is her first solo show in New York.
