membership / artist member

Robert Orchardson

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Born in Glasgow and based in London, Robert Orchardson graduated from Goldsmiths College in 2004.

Solo exhibitions include Perfect Vacuum, Wilkinson Gallery, London, 2005; Beyond, Monitor Gallery, Rome, 2005; Symmetriad, Galerie Ben Kauffman,Munich, 2004; and News from Nowhere, the Changing Room Gallery, Stirling, 2002.

Robert Orchardson’s work draws upon elements like modernist architecture and design, utopian texts, or details from science fiction films. These appropriated fragments are dislocated from their original cultural contexts, and any sense of their previous functionality becomes skewed, or distant. Orchardson plays with this shift, to create work that exists in a limbo between where it has come from what it might become. Allowing a variety of cultural flotsam to surface, he reconfigures disparate elements to collectively become something new, and explore a sense of how we look to that which is beyond our immediate situation or understanding.

“Robert Orchardson’s work recalls utopian tendencies described in science fiction imagery and Futurist design. Forms pictured briefly in novels or film are crafted as abstracted sculptures; a pattern from a film still is rendered as a wooden screen, low-tech resin casts playfully suggest mineral forms in an alien landscape or vintage curios. Freeze-framing fantasy, Orchardson explores the spiritual and conceptual investment in the formal language of the modern.”
- Michelle Cotton

“Oscillating between image and object, Orchardson’s sculptural interventions deal equally with figuration and abstraction, physicality and immateriality, and it’s this instability that ensures the work retains a degree of autonomy, resisting being read in any singular way.”
- Andy Hunt

http://www.wilkinsongallery.com/artists.html

http://www.benkaufmann.com

http://www.monitoronline.org

• The substance of things unseen

  14th December — 3rd February 2006
  The Economist Plaza 25 St. James's Street, London SW1A 1HG

• ARTfutures 2007

  7th March — 12th March 2007
  Bloomberg Space 50 Finsbury Square London EC2A 1HD

• ARTfutures 2008

  6th March — 12th March 2008
  Bloomberg Space 50 Finsbury Square London EC2A 1HD