Robin Mitchell

Robin Mitchell’s artwork focuses on the act of mark-making to explore how the mark, in its abstract nature, can communicate an image and transcend beyond it to suggest themes both tangible and intangible. The paintings are multi-layered compositions of marks, gestures, and brushstrokes that are both literal and suggestive of a variety of natural forms. This layering results in an overlap of the abstract, the nonobjective, the representational, the referential, and the evocative. The combination of obsessive brushwork, complex layering, and highly active relationships between elements across and within the paintings results in a strong optical resonance.

Her paintings are part of the tradition of work by artists like Agnes Martin, Hilma Af Klimt, Emma Kunz, and Bill Jensen, who underpin abstract representation with spiritual elements. Mitchell makes use of a variety of media including paintings on canvas, drawings and paintings on paper, prints, and sculpture, and produces work in a wide range of sizes from intimate and immediate small works on paper to large paintings on canvas. The body of work is obsessive, detailed, and physical through mark-making, gesture, and an organic growth of thought and image.