William Robinson is the only living Australian artist with a public gallery dedicated to his work. Since 2009, the William Robinson Gallery has held regular exhibitions showcasing the prolific Queensland artist’s oeuvre.
The latest is Numinous, focusing on landscape painting. These works are largely from the 80s, 90s and early 2000s, showing the natural world through Robinson’s careful eye. “He never went out to landscapes that he didn’t understand,” says curator Vanessa Van Ooyen. “He always painted where he lived, those really familiar spaces—so you get the really rich connection that he’s got to the landscape.”
This show has been in the making since Ooyen first came across Robinson’s work in the 90s as part of an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. “At that time, I was actually writing my thesis on spirituality in art, and it was called Numinous,” she says. “I saw his work in the context of spirituality.”
The works include everything from Robinson’s large-scale, multi-panel Creation series, featuring The dome of space and time 2003/04 on display for the first time, to small, detailed oil paintings measuring just 30 centimetres. The apocalyptic Evening Bushfire (2004) reflects Robinson’s thinking around the changing landscape: “His environmental concerns come through in quite a lot of his work,” Van Ooyen says.
Working in the gallery and curating exhibitions based on Robinson’s work, Van Ooyen has developed a deep appreciation of the artist’s vision. “The whole idea of this single artist museum is that you really get this depth of understanding… It’s the true meaning of slow art and slow curating,” she says. “There’s always room for discoveries, even when you’ve been looking at his practice for so long.”
Numinous: The Landscape Paintings of William Robinson
William Robinson Gallery
On now—31 August
This article was originally published in the January/February 2025 print issue of Art Guide Australia.
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