Post Referendum Portraits – Rob Birch
Open from 1st December 2017 to 8th January 2018
C&C Gallery is pleased to announce the first London solo show of work by artist Rob Birch.
Rob Birch’s work has been described as visual scepticism. He uses digital collage techniques as a means of challenging received notions of truth and reality, and within the portrait genre notion of self, identity and beauty.
To this end it is centred on the belief that art is not made but found.
The Brexit referendum was a referendum about the identity of the UK and its inhabitants. The process’, rhetoric and result of the vote has led to a crisis in the way identity is formed and how that can be expressed through contemporary portraiture. The traditional portrait is a highly political image, and in this age of political flux, not to mention gender fluidity, sexual experimentation and the ability to create new virtual representations of the self, can the need for a “likeness” be reconciled with the current inability to find a satisfactory visual lexicon with which to do so.
Rob Birch believes there is a crisis in understanding how identity and subjectivity works in a post Brexit Britain. These images address this creatively, actively engaging the visual senses and using them as a primary source of understanding and communication within this complex and (somewhat) antagonistic world.