For the first 20 years of her artistic career, Sally Robinson produced screen prints of Australian life and landscapes using photostencils to create a mechanical texture that echoes the pixellated way we view the world through print and electronic media. These iconic images of Bondi Beach, Ayers Rock and Kakadu were followed by a series of prints depicting the Antarctic after Robinson received an Australian Antarctic Division Humanities Program Award in 1991/1992.
In 1999 Robinson began painting portaits, using stencils to again create a mechanically regular texture to pixellate her image. Since that time her portraits have been regularly included in portrait competition exhibitions such as the Archibald Prize, the Salon des Refuses, the Portia Geach Portrait Award, the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize and the Shirley Hannan National Portrait Award. Concurrently, Sally Robinson has painted colour field abstract paintings – riots of colour in stencilled lines, dots or dashes that create a spacial illusion.

Since 1976 Robinson has held a number of solo exhibitions around Australia at venues including the Art Gallery of South Australia and the Penrith Regional Gallery in Emu Plains, NSW. She has also participated in many group exhibitions, both nationally and internationally. These include: the 11th International Print Biennial, Tokyo, Japan (1979); 'Survey 12 – On Paper’ at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne (1980); the14th International Biennial of Graphic Art in Yugoslavia (1981); 'Australian Art of the '70s’ at Queensland Art Gallery (1986); 'Prints and Australia: Pre-settlement to Present’ at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, ACT (1989); and 'Portrait Artists Australia Exhibition’, Embassy of Australia, Washington DC, USA (2005).

Robinson’s work is held in most of the major state and national collections.

Writers:
Robinson, Sally
Date written:
2007
Last updated:
2007