Robin Sperling is a British artist and photographer. He studied at Fettes College, a private school in Edinburgh, and later received a bachelor’s degree with first class honours from Central Saint Martin’s College. After completing his education, Robin lived and worked in London and Berlin. In 2000, he moved and has been living since then in the Puszta region of southeastern Hungary.
In his creative practice, Robin Sperling combines abstract and conceptual art. Being a purist in spirit, he explores the concepts of space, emptiness, and plane using line as a tool. Unlike his conceptualist predecessors, like Robert Smithson, Richard Long or Andy Goldsworthy, who also appealed to the medium of the earth, Robin does not tend to dissolve his works into a landscape. On the contrary, he derives enjoyment from the original, raw materials being in constant dialogue with living matter. As in the works of Richard Long, his works balance natural design and the human-created systems. Robin’s palette is maintained with monochrome yellow-brown shades, combined with bright green and red tones.
Robin Sperling works in several mediums: painting, graphics, readymade and silk-screen printing. As an artist, he prefers to work with natural materials. Over the past 10 years, Robin has been actively using clay in his creative practice. Clay is associated with the parched soil of the Pannonian plain where he lives and works. Robin artificially simulates fault lines and allows the material to change in an organic way – many fissures appear according to the dictates of the material and the artist only guides and supports the natural pattern.
Robin Sperling’s long-standing passion is working with found objects and artifacts. One can find sprouted wild tobacco seeds and their flying fairylike fluff or volcanic ash in his works. Another “material” that attracts Robin is industrial waste: discarded objects left to decay develop a special character and energy. Belonging simultaneously to the world of man-made objects and the world of nature. Their content is the dichotomy of harmony and conflict.
Robin Sperling’s works are part of numerous public and private collections.
