Robin Friend
Bastard Countryside
May 4 - 27, 2023
Bastard Countryside upends the archetypal British landscape by seeking out scenes and color palettes – rusted orange and burnt ochre – more familiar to Friend’s childhood in Australia. Often, the things that caught his eye were modern ruins that took on the form of megalithic monuments: a mountain of abandoned cars tumbling into an underground lake, a blood red fort squatting on the sea rocks, three satellite dishes kneeling on the ground, their tripod legs broken.
This desire to make people slow down and consider the landscape is matched by the cynicism which pervades the work. In one reading, the images describe, in an oblique fashion, a human tragedy: a desperate land disfigured once by the rapacious capacity of the industrial revolution, and twice by the loss of that same industry. Simultaneously, the scenes of plastic-strewn fields and a beached and bloodied whale point to wider ecological destruction, an issue that will soon affect us all.
Friend says “I see it almost as an anxious nature. We’re all anxious about what the future holds and I feel like that is inherent in a lot of the pictures. I think that you couldn’t be a human without being worried about the kind of planet we’re leaving to our children.”
Robin Friend (British-Australian, b 1983, he/him/his) spent most of his childhood growing up in Melbourne, Australia. Currently based in the UK, he has a BA from the University of Plymouth and an MA from the Royal College of Art. Friend’s project Bastard Countryside was published by Loose Joints in 2018. In the same year he collaborated with Wayne McGregor to create and direct Winged Bull in the Elephant Case for BBC Live - an audacious dance dramatization of the journey of the National Gallery’s art collection during the second world war. Friend’s work has been exhibited in galleries and fairs globally ranging from Aperture Gallery in New York to the Pingyao Photography Festival in China, Christies in Paris and at the National Gallery, Somerset House and the Royal Academy of Arts in London. His work has been collected by the Martin Parr Foundation as well as private collections around the world.