With Sorrow Snare
ROBIN FRIEND
What Robin Friend's work manages to achieve, in a subtle, ironic and open-ended way, is to visually engage with human attitudes to what we call ‘Nature' in a manner that allows for many different interpretations.
On the one hand the images often allow themselves to fit into cultures of beauty: Whether it is the beauty of nature or decay, the images flirt with the kitsch that inevitably accompanies such questions. They frequently position themselves in the vicinity of certain old-fashioned aesthetics of disappearance, but they generously allow readings with contemporary relevance, and refrain from histrionic depictions of their themes.
Humans and the natural world are often at war in these images; we frequently see the detritus of some pitched battle, although it's never really clear who has the upper hand - as Friend says -"Nature is a destructive force. Yet so are humans". In the series Belly of the Whale, we see a torn shipwreck at the foot of cliffs, the photograph's slow exposure has turned the sea around the wreck into an ectoplasmic mist and the scene inevitably calls to mind the romantic destruction of Caspar David Friedrich's The Sea of Ice. Douglas Murphy
Robin Friend born in 1983, is a British Artist based in London. Working predominantly with the medium of photography his work explores the increasingly chaotic relationship we have towards nature. He has exhibited internationally and in 2010 he was chosen to be part of the prestigious reGenaration2 - Tomorrow's Photographers Today. The selection was made with one key question in mind: is the photographer likely to be known in twenty years' time? Robin graduated with a Masters in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art in 2009.
Zero10 Gallery are proud to present ‘With Sorrow Snare', Robin Friend's first solo exhibition.
