About

Dixon works from evocative old postcards, found photographs, film stills and his own images, piecing together figures and settings drawn from unrelated sources. The paintings that emerge are concerned with the relationship between figure and place. Groups of characters are assembled into scenes that suggest a history or a narrative without ever spelling one out, composed for rhythm, movement and the interaction between figures. As the work develops it is simplified and worked over, becoming steadily less site-specific and more timeless.

That process is literal as well as pictorial. Dixon frequently paints over earlier canvases, using the underpainting as a ground for new layers of colour. The result is an ambiguous sense of space in which new figures appear alongside surviving ones, and elements from different sources fit together in unexpected ways – some paintings may carry the background of an older work, while others incorporate new figures that change the dynamics of the picture completely.

Dixon's colour is subjective and his handling is quick, which has led to his work being described as impressionistic – a label he holds lightly. Viewers more often remark on its dreamlike quality and its sense of timelessness, and on the emotional connection it draws between the present and the past.

The exhibition also draws on the artist's own long memory. Dixon grew up in a large family in what is now Milton Keynes, at the point when the new city was being built over the existing farms and villages. Childhood was spent roaming in a loose gang of different ages and sizes: through woods where an abandoned farmhouse stood with a television sitting in the grass outside; down by the river and across fields until the group lost its way; and, on one occasion, through barbed wire and into the path of a farmer's wife with a gun under her arm and a large dog. Landscape was the scene of the adventure, and it remains so. Dixon is drawn above all to wasteland and to land that is disused or in transition, where the remnants of a previous time coexist with something new – and he still notices figures and groups in the landscape, and still puts them into the paintings.

“We love his enigmatic and emotive painterly work,” says Kristen Healy, founder of The Lido Stores. “His painting style is fresh and confident, whilst also suitably ambiguous to allow the viewer to project their own history, and family history, onto the scenes and characters depicted.”

Robin Dixon received a BA in Fine Art from Maidstone College of Art (KIAD) in 1989. Dixon has exhibited in group shows in the UK and internationally, and was selected for the Jerwood Painting Prize exhibition (2007) and the John Moores Painting Prize exhibition (2014). Recent exhibitions include An Exhibition of Small Things with Big Ideas, White Conduit Projects, London; Let's Get Lost, The Wild Thought, Sugar Cube II and The Lido Open at The Lido Stores, Margate; The Wells Art Contemporary Open; The Turner Contemporary Open; The Immaculate Dream, Collyer Bristow Gallery, London; and Solitudes and Seasons, ARB, Cambridge. He lives and works in Gravesend and London.

Enquiries

Please email Kristen Healy — thelidostores@gmail.com with all enquiries.

Gallery open hours : Friday - Saturday, 11am -4pm, Sunday 10am - 2pm and by appointment.