NEWS
The Shed
8 May to 19 July, 2025
Opening Thursday, 8 May, 2025, 6 p.m.
10 & zero uno, Castello 1830, via Garibaldi, Venice
——
10 & zero uno gallery is proud to present The Shed, a solo exhibition by British artist John Robinson. Opening during the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, at Via Giuseppe Garibaldi, 1830 near the Giardini, the show will run from May 8 2025 to July 19, 2025, with a special vernissage on Thursday, May 8, at 6:00 PM, preceded by a full day of ongoing performances by the artist.
At the core of Robinson’s exhibition stands a shed — originating from his communal vegetable garden near his home, now transformed into a nomadic space for performance, memory, and metamorphosis. Having journeyed from Worcestershire to Rotterdam and now Venice, this modest wooden structure will serve as the setting for a series of intimate and cathartic performances during the exhibition’s opening days: a re- enactment of Robinson’s childhood birthday party and a tarot reading using unique cards created by the artist. As part of the experience, those participating in the performances will become incorporated into the painting itself, becoming an integral part of Robinson’s artwork, their presence permanently captured on canvas during the event, blurring the line between art, memory, and documentation.
Painters have been known throughout history to suffer for their art. In a conceptual about- face, by compelling his audience to participate in his performances, Robinson makes them suffer instead, in order to extract situations that have the potential of becoming unusual paintings. Being inside a John Robinson performance, participants are included in what amounts to a manufactured failure, which may result in embarrassment and awkwardness or even outright humiliation. Surveilling these emotional states allows Robinson to capture moments of visual arrest, which are later rendered in paint. Robinson’s practice touches our concerns of how we as human beings imagine we are perceived by others and our fear of exposure in our more vulnerable psychological states.
Robinson’s practice is steeped in disguise, through self-portraiture, history, and the occult, blending manufactured imagery with visceral, sepia-coloured paintings that document his performance process. His works, which draw from sources such as ecclesiastical architecture, tropes from vernacular mainstream culture and art history, interrogate the self as both subject and object, a fluid entity shaped by the masks we wear—whether they be that of a Velázquez nobleman, a selfie-filter or a grotesque circus caricature.
The Shed itself becomes a symbolic space, both temporary studio and psychological crucible. This physically intimate yet psychologically boundless structure frames his ongoing exploration of performance into painting, capturing fleeting, theatrical moments through the raw urgency of his observations.
VERSO
03/11/2023 - 26/11/2023
VERSO is the new exhibition by John Robinson, curated by Domenico de Chirico and organized by Zuecca Projects, opening in Turin on 3 November 2023.
On view, a rich selection of Robinson’s “self-portrait, in disguise”, including a new series of paintings resulting from his art residency and “Seance” performance hosted in Venice at Zuecca Projects (February 2023).
Painting a performance – that has been previously enacted privately in the artist’s studio or precariously in more public settings – is what Robinson has been focused on in his practice.
In his paintings, he studies the human psyche through its’ rituals and ceremonies and even its less appealing self-congratulatory manifestations. He often portrays himself behind a mask to gain access to the most obscure parts of human pathology, where embarrassment, empathy, cruelty and humiliation – but also the sublime – reside.
Denken ist einfach zu kopflastig
08/02/2023
Review by Wiener Zeitung of WELTGEIST Exhibition with John Robinson and others.
In German
WELTGEIST
18/01/2023 - 13/02/2023
Taking place at Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna, the exhibition “Weltgeist” opening on January 18 will aim to explore the power of humanism and how it has equipped itself through history to fathom the enormity of not knowing the fundamentals of its own existence, which has caused ideologies, governmental systems, religiosity and other belief systems to function in its ersatz. Stern has included seven international artists whose respective practices illuminate the subject. Janine Antoni - USA, Reza Aramesh - IRAN/U.K., Arvida Byström - SWEDEN, Alejandro Jodorowsky - CHILE/FRANCE, Hermann Nitsch, AUSTRIA, John Robinson, U.K. and Penny Slinger - USA.
The exhibition is loosely based on the principles of Hegel’s views on the Weltgeist (World spirit), not as an actual object or an all-encompassing, all-present God figure, but as a secular means to better understand and to philosophise about history.
John Robinson Solo Show "THUG"
26/03/2022 - 21/05/2022
John Robinson's works are inspired by the tradition of old masters of the 16th and 17th centuries, including the likes of Velazquez, Caravaggio and Goya, with particular attention to the self-portrait technique previously adopted by the likes of Dürer and Rembrandt and more recently by Frida Kahlo.
Robinson's figurative works offer a contemporary take on the rich tradition of portraiture. For the most part, the production of new visual signifiers is defined in accordance with one's own time, referring to mechanical reproduction, to moving images, and to digitization that took place in the twentieth century. Robinson's painting, on the other hand, appears problematic and laborious and offers a long path towards information, where skill and boredom coexist with equal equity in the painter's artistic research. This is a strange calling that provides an internship for one's theoretical death in correspondence with the speed of new contemporary artistic movements and trends
