The Hands Up Foundation Fundraiser Curated by Cramer & Bell

Robbie Fife’s intimate, small-scale works feature an intriguing array of subjects including toy-like towers that become rockets, mysterious figures, and sharks.  A course in Indian miniature painting, the architecture of the Spanish landscape, and an artistic residency rural Ireland have all profoundly influenced his practice resulting in gently surreal works that are rich in surface pattern and narrative. 

Robbie’s practice has recently expanded to include printmaking. Made in London and Cornwall, his painterly monotypes and limited edition prints continue to explore the idea of above and below, imagining worlds that exist under the surface of rural or planetary landscapes. Sticks, roots, black boxes, iceberg bellies, and rickety ferris wheels all appear as phenomena that could have been abandoned or buried. The characterful otherworldly protagonists that inhabit Robbie’s images are often inspired by family members or neighbours from the artist’s childhood in rural Yorkshire. For Robbie, printmaking ‘offers a different way to arrive at an image. There is an immediacy that I don’t find in my painting; fewer opportunities to agonise’.

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