Philip Bacon Galleries presents an exhibition by one of Australia’s greatest living artists.

William Robinson’s Farmyards exhibition is a selection of oil paintings, gouache and pastel works, and drawings which capture the ‘unceasing energy and disarray of farmyard life’.

Lynn Fern, in her 1995 publication on Robinson states ‘In the scattered objects of the farmyard, Robinson found possibilities for new compositional scatterings on his canvas. The real-life objects of the farmyard found a separate life as compositional elements. In these works, both the placement of their formal elements and their content result in a light-hearted mood of cheerful insouciance. These images support graphically the artist’s contention that what he paints is his own life.’

‘Robinson persistently paints life’s comedy. The farm at Birkdale presented him with endless subject matter for his comic vision. Yet these images are extremely complex. They incorporate perspectival shifts, the influence of Japanese woodblocks and the techniques of scattering and crowding. Element after element jostles for space on the canvas. It is part of the townsman’s humour that these elements consist of cows, goats, chooks, lean-tos, milking sheds and dunnies.’