LUAP

Paul Robinson, known professionally as LUAP, is a British contemporary artist working across various mediums including paint, print, photography, sculpture and installation.

Exploring existential subjects within a contemporary narrative his work stands alone in its composition and provoking content and subject matter. LUAP’s most iconic series depicts a Pink Bear come-to-life and is placed in the real world acting as a metaphor for discovery and exploration. The costumed figure – a striking motif in his work – exists between reality and make-believe, youthful innocence and adult corruption, leading a lifestyle that looks simultaneously enviable and questionable.

LUAP makes paintings from photos he has taken and mixes them up with the decorative patterns of wallpaper. Stripes, bright blocks of colour, furnishing fabric motifs, exist in an interior scene or join together to make up that interior scene. The artist's flat elegant shapes come from looking at Japanese woodblock printing and LUAP acknowledges a long graphic tradition of describing the world by painting flatly. In the process of making his paintings, LUAP paints over parts of the established image or they are wiped out or washed away to create a change in focus.

His work hints at abstract expressionism infused with the explosive energy and bold colour of Pop and Urban Art. Silk-screen printing or the use of stencils and painting from projection makes a dense detailed surface that breaks down and unpeels in front of our eyes to reveal a decaying world. The complexity of LUAP’s imagery and overlaying of pattern has been informed by the work of Robert Rauschenberg. LUAP paints a world that joins Christopher Wool's fabric paintings with a 1970's Peter Phillips pop landscape. LUAP paints two worlds and they both compete for our attention.

LUAP | Good Vibrations

£820.00 £960.00