Yulia Robinson at Cultivate, November 2019 – Painting detail

Yulia Robinson at Cultivate, Shipton Street Gallery, London E2, November 2019 – A Yulia Robinson solo show with guests Diane Goldie & Caroline Sayer – The third show and the final part of the November Cultivate Columbia Road takeover was essentially a solo show from London-based painter Yulia Robinson. We do encourage artists to being in guests and give a small piece of wall or plinth space when we do run solo shows, we see it as a way to cross pollinate, think of it in the same way you would with a band you are going to see, no one thinks twice about there being “special guests” on the bill,I really don’t see why more artists don’t do, it something I’ve always done with my solo own shows and something I always encourage when other artists have solo shows at Cultivate.

Yulia Robinson at Cultivate, November 2019

I did write something about the show back at the end November, things have been so stupidly busy though, I did write about how “the brilliant late afternoon light you get at this time of year in Hackney and East London makes it rather difficult not to think about the Autumn eight years ago when Cultivate first got off the ground. one of the very first (rather rushed) shows we put on was a group show called Red and one of the artists involved was Yulia Robinson, it was our first encounter with Yulia, we found her via an open call (as we have done with many of our artists who have now become regulars), Yulia took up over half the gallery floor with a rather exciting rather red installation piece that still remains a Cultivate highlight, since then Yulia has returned, as a painter, on a number of occasions to take part in Cultivate group shows in Vyner Street, over in Dalston when we Cultivated at BSMT Space, at Shipton Street and that time when she exhibited two rather large paintings at that one-off show at we put on over Coate Studios back in 2017 – a big group show called Interact that we managed to put on during the weekend that Coate was in transition and changing hands, the studios had just closed and it was about to be refurbished and converted to become yet another of those hot desk rent by the day spaces that have sucked up so much of East London”.

Yulia Robinson at Cultivate, November 2019

Yulia Robinson is an exciting painter, something about the energy in the marks she makes, the colour she uses, the ambition in her paint, the spontaneity, her blowing and dripping, her bleaching, her multi-layered paintings that involve both figurative forms and an abstract language, Yulia’s paintings are rich in texture, alive with personality, with commitment, with a vibrancy that comes with excitement of paint, the excitement of painting, of doing. Impulsive, physically expressive, sometimes unexpected, there;s a lot of movement in a Yulia Robinson painting. Up until this show it has been mostly about those wonderful Flamingo paintings

Yulia Robinson at Cultivate, November 2019

So Yulia came back for a show in late November, a solo show as part of the month-long Cultivate Columbia Road takeover We invited her because we had been rather enjoying Yulia’s evolving style, her painterly development, her flamingoes, her corsets, her vivid colour, the energy of her mark making. For this show Yulia invited painter/sculptor Caroline Sayer and extremely colourful textile artist/clothes maker Diane Goldie, but it really was about Yulia’s paintings and yes, up until this show it has been mostly about those wonderful Flamingos and the energy of that red and pink paint, but Yulia is evolving, the new pieces she squeezed in to the small space were full of energy, full of paint, full of movement, full of that almost primitive way she uses paint, the flamingoes, as wonderful as they still are, almost feel like last year’s new, these new paintings are exciting, they really are about paint, about colour about use of paint, about the energy of colour, I just love her painterly way, her economy in the fullness of it all, her control, her ability to know when to stop, to keep that paint clean, fresh, exciting, I genuinely think she’s one of the most exciting emerging painters on the London scene right now, she doesn’t really get to show in any of the establishment galleries, I’m really not sure why, I really need to see her worked spread out in a decent space where it can catch breath far more than the small space at Shipton Street allowed. Yulia Robinson, originally from Sakhalin Island, right over on the far side of Russia, is an exciting painter, and as we so often say on these fractured pages, you really really need to see her painting in the flesh, get up close with that paint and that movement and that texture, the photos won’t really tell you, her not very good website won’t tell you, so try and check her work out next time you get a chance, rather enjoyed getting to spend a lot of time with these paintings… (sw) …

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