Floating female nudes by Jeff Robb
Fine art holography is considered the starting point of the artist’s research.
“[I am] A London based artist; Royal College of Art trained. With a science degree and a taste for fine wine.”
Biography
Jeff Robb was born in 1965 in Derbyshire, UK. He graduated with Distinction from the Royal College of Art in 1992 with a Masters degree in Fine Art Holography. He lives and works in London.
Jeff Robb is a true experimental artist which combine modern technologies with traditional artistic techniques. Since his graduation, Robb has never stopped to create art, particularly experimenting with three-dimensional imaging. During those days, the artist was asked by V&A Museum to submit a landscape work for its permanent collection: the first real hologram artwork of the Museum.
The artist is used to work with the female nude through different mediums such as painting, bronze and silver cast sculptures, reflection and transmission holography, lenticular photography, film, laser light, sound installations and his cutting-edge modelling technology which he combines with historic casting techniques.
Fine art holography is considered the starting point of the artist’s research. Experimenting with three-dimensional images, Robb creates lenticular photographs. In his lenticular photographic series, he specifically employs the female body while, at the same time, analyses abstract forms in space. At the end, his main aim is to completely involve the audience into an immersive experience which transports it into other worlds, but with same dimensions and physical properties of our own. Clearly, artist’s ultimate goal is to push the limits of what a photograph can be.
Sound installations, laser lights, and film are another important mediums used by Robb. The artist, in fact, creates projects reflecting upon how the audience experiences the sound while producing large-scale kinetic installations for public spaces, museums, and galleries. What drives the artist, again, is his experimentation will: testing and producing new involving experience, exploiting all technologies available in our contemporary society. Each project has a strong and unique significance for him.
Jeff Robb’s artworks are shown in worldwide galleries and art fairs and features in museums and private collections around the world.
Emblematic Works
Nightfall
Jeff Robb is clearly best known for his floating female nudes. Robb’s series involved both full-length figures and cropped ones. As in Nightfall, the artist employs cropped figures which reveal a metaphorical interpretation: a female body metamorphosis which still remains ipersensual thanks to the colours used. The lenticular photograph’s illusion is a perfect medium to create a cascade of visions to thrill the viewer. Moreover, pops of movement make possible for figures to “swim” in their environment. At the end, all possible impressions came into play while considering Robb’s artworks.
“Shards of raw vivid hung from the ceiling like some sci-fi slaughterhouse of the mind (Acts of Will)… the human form, rid of adornment, arched into some convex construct from Futureworld (Affinity)… untolled beauties, stripped or sheathed, created and set free to float through all of the eternity’s caged gleam (Unnatural Causes)…”
Classical angels and maenads are clearly evoked in these images, but without any given clear evidence by the artist to the medieval and Renaissance art. The final aim of the artist is to use the human body to give a sense of positive freedom, in our contemporary 21st-century vision.
Thought Experiments
Once again, Robb employs images of floating female nudes. This time, full-length figures’ metaphor is simplified into patterns through the usage of the whole female body. In this three-dimensional artworks, women could appear floating in their sea-green world while making the audience feels at peace. Each figure seems to reincarnate shadows of surrealist drama’s images. To the audience is let the final interpretation.
“If there is a metaphorical element in the full-length figures, maybe it is because they represent psychological states of mind. The figures in repose appear to float like feathers in black space. The models seem lost in another world, mindful of nothing. Sitting, standing or kneeling, however, the figures seem to be very much in this world — contemplative or concerned. Perhaps we see our moods in these models.”
While exploiting the light in order to flash the body and make it visible from the surrounding velvety darkness, the female nude emerge like a marble sculpture. The final image merges together the implacable hardness of stone and the nuanced and soft female figure.
THREE ACTS
For the artist, the 21st century is a world leading three-dimensional image-makers. So that, the English artist announced the birth of the ‘Holographic Sculpture’: an innovative concept which combines cutting-edge three-dimensional image-making and sculptural form.
Three Acts of Will represents the starting point of this new art form.
Some exhibitions
(2017) London Art Fair with Shine/Pontone
(2016) BIËNNALE VEGHEL KOEKBOUW Van Loon en Simons Context Miami with Shine/Pontone
(2015) Art Taipei 2015 with Shine Artists Art Silicon Valley/San Francisco
(2015) San Mateo Shine Artists Art Southhampton, New York USA Shine
(2015) Artists 345 Broome Street, New York USA Shine Artists Art Busan
(2015) South Korea Shine Artists Art 15 London UK Shine Artists
