Robbie Motion (b.1995) 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. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his paintings have a languid, distorted quality that is at once melodic and unsettling. Influenced by the work of Irish/British painter Francis Bacon (1909 - 1992), Motion's figures possess a certain vulnerability, with their limbs and faces distorted, obliterated, and overlapping; their outward physical contortions seeming to articulate internalised mental or emotional preoccupations.
Previous exhibitions include Artists on Artists, Twentysix + Aratoi Museum of Art & History (2024); A Body Was Here, Page Galleries (2022); Bodily Incarnations, Nomadic Art Gallery Online (2022); Alphabet Soup: The Finest Stock, Page Galleries (2022); Figure Skating, Page Galleries (2021); Sunlit Stairwell, Hunters & Collectors (2021), After Thought, Hunters & Collectors (2020); This Time With Feeling, Thistle Hall (2019).