Photograph by Hugh Chesterman; Courtesy of the artist
Robbie Motion studied Art History and Film and Media at the University of Otago. His painting practice began through creating artwork for album covers and posters for local Dunedin bands. Unsurprisingly, his paintings possess a languid, distorted quality that is at once melodic and unsettling. There is a certain vulnerability to these figures; with limbs and faces distorted, obliterated, and overlapping they are at once absurd and graceful. Motion presents us with the abstracted parts of a face, a body, and these outward physical contortions seem to articulate internalized mental or emotional preoccupations.