Julie Roberts
Julie Roberts was born in North Wales in 1963, and lives and works in Carlisle, England. Graduating with a Masters from Glasgow School of Art in 1993, Julie went on to exhibited extensively in Europe and the Americas. Today she is included in the collections of Tate Britain and the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC, as well as museum and private collections throughout the world.
Double Prayer
By Julie Roberts
2012
During the first ten years of her practice her paintings were associated with a strong visual iconography consisting of a single image, usually medical, isolated against a saturated colour ground, which gradually extended itself into tableau settings. she isolated shrunken objects, including pieces of hospital furniture, and dollhouse-like domestic spaces and landscapes, against monochromatic backgrounds, causing them to appear disquieting and pregnant with secrets. Eventually, as she describes, she “slowly started creeping toward the edge of the canvas,” filling every inch with women, children, and homey spaces rendered with a deadpan formality that both conceals and suggests the turbulence they contain within.
Workhouse/Boys Ward
By Julie Roberts
2013
In her unsettling paintings, prints, and drawings, Julie Roberts mines her own difficult childhood to portray what she calls the “disruption” lurking beneath the placid façade of bucolic landscapes and domestic scenes. Her painting style eloquently balancing a stark and sophisticated contemporary gaze with a nostalgic though unsettling glimpse of human frailties. This balance always strikes to maximise the tension between attraction and repulsion, the real and the perceived and between abstraction and figuration. Grounded in her extensive research into the modern history of the U.K., and influenced by a range of artists, from Barbara Kruger to Jenny Holzer, Roberts’s work is dense with detail and references.
In 2010 Julie Roberts held an exhibition at the Talbot Rice Gallery in the University of Edinburgh. Click the link below for the video of what the curator of that exhibition had to say.