PM/AM is proud to present a collection of new paintings by Lucy Robson, which will be her first solo exhibition. The London-based South African artist works at the intersection of beauty, image-making, and cultural critique—revisiting the visual language of hyper-femininity not as ornament, but as a site of tension, contradiction, and power. Evoking Rococo seduction and early Surrealist ambiguity, her voice is unmistakably of this moment. As Robson notes, “Femininity is a life-long game, one that requires you to be devoted to your own contortion.” The exhibition reveals that paradox—with tenderness, unease, and visual clarity.
Lucy Robson is a South African visual artist living and working in London. Her practice engages with the visual and material textures of femininity, where hyper-aestheticised relics of girlhood, and their shelf of souvenirs–a pair of porcelain angels in prayer, a heart-shaped locket and harlow-gold hair–are neither fetishised nor dismissed but repurposed as important signifiers of girlhood.
Soft femininity is often mistaken for passivity, but in Lucy’s work, it is wielded with sharp intentionality, its connotations rendered uncanny through their very excess. Lucy’s signifiers of girlhood do not function as benign nostalgia, instead, they are reanimated as sites of tension, where blushed hues stand in friction with latent threats—an outstretched foot, raised vein, and a tender gasp signal at the deeper tensions behind her works.
The feminine, and by extension the girly-girl archetype, is historically and culturally loaded; both idealised and dismissed within the lexicon of visual culture. Lucy’s work does not seek to reclaim or romanticise the aesthetic of girlhood but rather to interrogate its architectures: where does its power reside? Whom does it serve? And what might it obscure? Her aesthetic lineage extends from the delicate erotics of the Rococo–Boucher’s pink-lit odalisques and Fragonard’s weightless muses–to the darker ambiguities of Surrealism, where femininity was often rendered uncanny, a thing of veils, dolls, and fragmented bodies.
Western traditions have historically positioned women as reflections of masculinity rather than autonomous subjects, reducing femininity to a mirror-like aesthetic that reinforces male selfhood instead of asserting an independent ontological presence. By contrast, Lucy seeks to reposition femininity not as spectacle, but as a contested field of agency and signification. Her practice dismantles the ornamental frameworks historically imposed upon the feminine, allowing for a rearticulation of girlhood as something unruly, excessive, and resistant to containment. While feminist theory has long sought to rescue femininity from its perceived fragility–recasting it as a site of resistance or empowerment–such binaries (submissive or subversive, weak or strong) often fail to capture the spectral, more ambivalent forces at play within the aestheticisation of girlhood. Lucy’s work maps a more intricate terrain, where softness is not the opposite of tension, but rather its accomplice.
Lucy constructs a visual language that is neither derivative nor contingent, refusing the demand that femininity exists as an ornamental supplement to male subjectivity, or a mirror-like aesthetic that reinforces male selfhood rather than asserting an independent ontological presence. Through her work, Lucy resists this historical flattening, asserting a feminine aesthetic that is self-fashioning rather than reflective, self-possessed rather than absent.
A sensual gasp is titled, ‘To please gods and deter demons’, while an outstretched and perfectly manicured foot is named, ‘Instant Crush’. Lucy pairs female sensuality with a somatic playfulness that feels at once girly, as it does religious. Lucy notes, ‘Power, femininity and visibility are inextricably linked… even as young girls, we understand that the big and blazing stories happen to beautiful women. Catholicism shaped my basic instincts around image-making; a profound tethering between beauty and holiness, and a penchant for pain, emotional pageantry, and of course, high drama.’
For Lucy, the feminine is inextricably tied to its larger cultural context: while seeking to disassemble it at the same time. In distorting the idealised contours of femininity, Lucy’s work embodies a haunted quality, by conjuring a femininity that appears stable and perhaps legible, but becomes eerie upon closer inspection: and is this not femininity’s final form?
Lucy notes: ‘You don’t escape the realities of being a woman in this world. Some of those realities are easier to bear–even satisfying–but more often I find myself thinking that femininity is a life-long game that requires you to be devoted to your own contortion.’ Lucy remarks that ultimately, her work is about the undoing of the fantasy, and showing what it might mean to face up to that, but still remain yoked to feminine symbology. Through the material syntax of her paintings, Lucy complicates the simplistic idea that this symbology is merely a construct to be reclaimed or rejected. Instead, she exposes its historical burden, its affective weight, its double-bind of seduction and constraint.
By repurposing relics of the girly archetype, she does not simply celebrate or critique them—she unsettles them, positioning femininity as something both deeply familiar and fundamentally estranging. Hers is an aesthetic language of ambiguity, where innocence is not a sanctuary but a site of tension, where beauty does not promise safety but instead forges of something more insidious. In this, Lucy’s work does not merely depict girlhood—it performs its contradictions, making visible the mechanisms by which femininity is constructed, consumed, and, ultimately, dismantled.
If femininity is a haunted architecture, then Lucy positions herself as both its inhabitant and its trespasser. Her work does not merely depict girlhood; it performs its contradictions, making visible the mechanisms by which femininity is constructed, consumed, and undone. It is within this interplay of ornamentation and alienation, that her paintings demand to be read—not as passive reflections, but as active interrogations of the gaze that seeks to contain them. Robson’s work does not seek to resolve the tensions of femininity but rather to insist upon them, revealing a visual language that is spectral and insistently present. —Isabella Greenwood
