LUAP’s Solo Exhibition at Andipa Gallery - The Hero’s Journey
Pink Bear is getting his own show. This week, the Andipa Gallery in Knightsbridge — known for its extensive Banksy collection — opens LUAP’s debut solo exhibition, The Hero’s Journey. The show presents a curated collection of paintings, photography, and unique Pink Bear prints, telling a fantastical and deeply personal story about LUAP’s iconic alter ego.
The exhibition features a brand-new series of 30 + 3 APs titled The Journey, including the standout piece The Heroes Journey (2016), rendered in acrylic and screen print on Somerset White Satin Paper. These new prints have evolved from LUAP’s recent decoupage paper works and reflect his continued exploration of combining pattern with character, much like in his large-scale paintings.
The theme of The Hero’s Journey is one of self-development — of striving forward even in the face of adversity. When things look bleak, we always have a choice: to give up or to find the bright, colourful path that still exists. In one piece, the blue sky is replaced with a crumbling painted surface, allowing vivid patterns to break through. The Pink Bear stands at the end of a broken road in an empty abstract landscape, reflecting on how far he’s come. He doesn’t give up.
Emerging from childhood memory and reimagined through the lens of adulthood, the Pink Bear navigates surreal landscapes, deserted highways and psychological terrain. Through these environments, LUAP explores questions of purpose, connection and personal transformation.
In Jumping Bear, we meet a hopeful figure leaping along a highway. In Fail Guard, we feel the weight of mortality. In Motel Bear, themes of isolation and self-reflection take centre stage. The works move with emotional precision, each representing stages in a broader narrative.
"The complexity of Robinson’s imagery and overlaying of pattern has been informed by the work of Robert Rauschenberg. Robinson paints a world, which joins Christopher Wool’s fabric paintings with a 1970’s Peter Phillips pop landscape. These images are reminiscence of dream sequences from 1960’s films; a drug trip depicted in solarisation photography where the image recorded is wholly or partially reversed in tone.”
— Martin Maloney, Artist
"Robinson is an amazing storyteller. The strength of his work comes from his talent for capturing a moment, combined with highly detailed landscapes and the iconic imagery of the Pink Bear."
— Daniel Campos, Exhibitions, Andipa
In Williams Bear-G, the Pink Bear is lost in the crowd of New York, surrounded yet solitary, a symbol of alienation within a hyper-connected world. In Me and My Shadow, he walks a long abstract road, suggesting that every end might be the start of another journey.
With this exhibition, LUAP offers more than a collection of works — he invites viewers to reflect on their own paths, challenges, and transformations. As the artist steps into this new chapter, The Hero’s Journey marks not just a milestone, but a beginning.