Caught in the Act

Finn Robinson

13 February - 8 March 2026

Finn Robinson steals images from art history, social media and personal archives. He takes compositions from artists he can't talk to, and subjects from online accounts where he doesn't know the people, reproducing their likeness in his paintings. There's a power imbalance in this act of appropriation that extends into the gallery, where viewers too project their own meanings onto the paintings. Rather than resolving that imbalance, Robinson embeds it in the work.

He is drawn to images instinctively, wanting to spend time with them. That wanting is what drives his practice. Not what the painting becomes, but the pull toward it in the first place. The images arrive stripped of their original contexts, but that tension between what they were and what they are now activates the work.

They have narratives, but they resist telling stories. Bodies are cropped, squeezed, refusing to come into frame. They are out of view, out of reach. The paintings stage moments under a spotlight, like the scene has been paused and, for a moment, the party stands still.

But the paintings aren't passive. They develop their own presence, they look back at you. They're queer, curious, different, unknowable. You think you recognise one and then something shifts.

Robinson grew up in the highlands of Scotland, where summer brings perpetual twilight and the sun never fully sets. It's a similar quality of inbetweenness that saturates the work: unplaceable moments where things permeate each other in a dreamlike haze. Robinson doesn't smooth the frictions in these paintings or fix their awkwardness. Instead, his work inhabits the sticky discomfort of feeling "almost there".

This solo exhibition offers an early insight into Robinson's practice ahead of his MFA degree show this summer. He is generously supported by Daler-Rowney, who has contributed materials for his latest works.