Robert Pepperell
FRSA

Robert Pepperell was born in London in 1963; he studied at the Slade School of Art, leaving in 1988. Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s he exhibited numerous innovative electronic works, including at Ars Electronica, the Barbican Gallery, Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art, the ICA, and the Millennium Dome. He has also published several influential books, including The Posthuman Condition (1995 and 2003) and The Postdigital Membrane (2000), as well as many articles, reviews and papers. He is an Associate Editor with Leonardo, the journal of the International Society for Arts, Technology and Science, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Robert’s paintings and drawings are the result of intensive experimentation in materials and methods designed to evoke a very specific, though elusive, state of mind. The works induce a disrupted perceptual condition in which what we see cannot be matched with what we know. Instead of a recognizable depiction the viewer is presented with what the art historian Dario Gamboni has called a potential image, that is, a complex multiplicity of possible images, none of which ever finally resolves. Engaging in an ongoing dialogue with art of the past, particularly the Baroque and early Cubism, the works on canvas, panel and paper weave a complex web of impossible and contradictory passages suggesting erotic or heroic dramas with both bestial and transcendent overtones. The images, when seen in real life, are compelling and often disturbing despite the traditional aesthetic framework they occupy.