ROBIN MITCHELL

ABSRACT 2+2

On exhibit through August 27, 2022

Robin Mitchell lives and works in Santa Monica, California. She received both her BFA (1972) and MFA (1974) from the California Institute of the Arts. While an undergraduate student at Cal Arts, she was a member of the Feminist Art Program and worked on the historic Womanhouse Project.

Robin Mitchell Descriptive Statement

Robin Mitchell’s artwork is involved with the act of mark making and how the mark in its abstract nature can communicate and transcend to evoke both the tangible and the ineffable. The paintings on paper and on canvas 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.

The growth and evolution of the body of artwork is to her as engaging as any individual artwork. Her art making is a search for a personal kind of logic and order to understand the world and myself in it. She works in a variety of mediums including paintings on canvas, paintings on paper, drawings, prints, and sculpture.

Her earliest paintings and drawings were representations of energy through process and materials. These artworks were an exploration of expressive abstract painting, most of it rooted in landscape. The imagery of the paintings has grown through the development of a personal painterly vocabulary. In many of the paintings there is a strong central imagery that is reflective of identity, both physically and psychologically. Many early paintings have a vertical column of bead-like forms, alluding to the spine, a symbol of both my inner strength and physical body. As this imagery developed this spine-like column evolved to take on the characteristics suggestive of trees, plants, and then flower forms. This central imagery is often a radiating image that she refers to as the “exuberant self,” visually expanding out from the center to become an expressive physical representation of energy.

www.robinmitchell.net