Fête Galante (secretly you’d love to know what it’s like… wouldn’t you?)
Oil and coloured pencil on canvas
180 x 200 cm
2026

Finn Robinson

Finn Robinson (b.2000, Inverness, Scotland) was brought up in the Highland towns of Tain and Bonar Bridge. He moved to Glasgow in 2018 to study Painting and Printmaking at The Glasgow School of Art which he graduated from with First-Class Honours in 2022. Since then, Finn has continued living and working in Glasgow, while exhibiting his work across the UK and selling it internationally. Finn was shortlisted for Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2023, selected for the RSA New Contemporaries 2024, and won the Cass Art Prize People’s Choice award 2025. Most recently, he won the SSA Past President Prize 2026 at the SSA 127th Annual Exhibition.

I make paintings from images I feel drawn towards, usually without fully knowing why. Starting with something I’ve seen that feels emotionally familiar or has a recognisable charge, painting becomes a way for me to process these encounters, dwell on what I’m responding to, and stage alternative readings.
My work starts close to my subject, but the truth shifts as I paint. Colour, gesture, and atmosphere change as the image slips away from its source as it drifts towards my desires. Feelings like awkwardness, shame, desire, and excess can shift in meaning through painting, and I stay with the instability that comes from my contemporary gaze without trying to soothe it.
The figures in my work aren’t self-portraits, but they often sit between observation and projection. They can be read as shifting states of identity, where different versions of self are performed rather than fixed. The paintings operate like a theatre; characters paused mid-performance, preparing for something unknown.
At its core, my paintings are about working with images rather than against them, letting them develop unstable selves that can be misread, repeated, and reformed through painting, enduring the traces of their histories.