Additional Images

Provenance:

Private Collection, Vancouver

Note:

This lot is located in Vancouver.

Dating back to when he was a student in the 1980s, Robinson’s work is often centred around a lean nude male figure, which the artist views as “an accessible receptacle of the human imagination.” He writes that his sculptures,“before they are anything else, are manifestations of fitful waking dreams; narratives whole and smashed, images and ideas all distilled through the passage of time and the particular resistance of matter.” [1]

In a profile of Robinson, Gordon L. Fuglie describes Solitude Standing as portraying “a man wrap[ping] his arms around himself, seeming to ponder his next move, his unease underscored by the alarmingly narrow pedestal supporting him. Unlike those generals, bishops, and kings of heroic nineteenth-century monuments, exalted on massive ornamented plinths, this figure anxiously huddles over a small air grate, and we know he cannot stay there long.”[2] Typical of Robinson’s work, the sculpture is infused with both humour and heaviness, or, to borrow again from Fuglie, both “levity and gravity.”

https://www.davidrobinsonstudio.com/artist-statement/myth-begotten-monuments
https://imagejournal.org/article/levity-and-gravity/