Daniel Katz Gallery
Dates: Friday 12 to 26 September 2025
Private View: Thursday 11 September, 6:30pm – 8:30pm
Location: 6 Hill Street, London, W1J 5NF
Information: Opening Tel. +44 20 7493 0688 / katz.art
Hours: Monday to Friday, 9.30am to 6.00pm
The Daniel Katz Gallery is pleased to announce our forthcoming exhibition
Interiors by the celebrated Cincinnati-based painter, Emil Robinson, courtesy of
Abattoir Gallery. Featuring 8 new works, curated by Byron Houdayer and Robin
Katz, the exhibition opens on Friday 12th September and runs until Friday 26th
September 2025 at 6 Hill Street, London, W1J 5NF.
Abattoir is a space for contemporary art in Cleveland, Ohio, US. The gallery was
launched in 2020 by Lisa Kurzner and presents a program of emerging talent in
the region, and nationally. Abattoir showcases exhibitions in all media and has
placed work in museum and prestigious corporate collections. In addition to
presenting a vibrant program of shows in Cleveland, the gallery presents at
premier art fairs in New York, Miami, Chicago and Mexico City.
These paintings ask for a slower kind of looking. Robinson treats rooms as people: capable of moods, prickly with memory, lit by weather as much as by windows. He learned to see spaces once everyone had gone home—working as a school janitor as a teenager—and that vantage remains: the privileged, invisible visitor who notices secrets left-in skirting boards, exit signs and the scuff of a doorhandle. A sun-struck kitchenette, a stairwell blueing into night, a church corridor with suspended-ceiling tiles: tender without sentimentality and quietly exact about the world’s useful clutter.
He works in the liminal—the threshold phase in a rite of passage, when one state has been shed and the next not yet begun. Not an aesthetic of eeriness, but a pause for attention. Today the world has drifted toward empty corridors and office carpets, fluorescent after-hours; Robinson’s rooms have more to say: not horror, not nostalgia, but evidence that living happens in the thresholds between tasks, faith and maintenance, sanctuary and fire-exit.
Light is his co-conspirator. It travels across white paint like a temperament—warm, then violet, then almost green—altering everything it touches. As he puts it, he aims to arrive at the “qualities of things” rather than likeness alone; echoing William Nicholson's doorframe becomes both wood and weather, object and atmosphere. There is, too, a poetry of silence. Like Hammershøi, Robinson returns to unpeopled interiors that move at the pace of thought—cool rooms, doors ajar, time held in a hush. Yet where Hammershøi circled the same Copenhagen rooms, sometimes with a figure turned away, Robinson leads us through the familiar but overlooked thresholds of our day—places of work, faith and maintenance. His light is sensuous and changeable, warmer than Hammershøi’s north-facing silvertones. If the Dane’s doors withhold the story, Robinson’s open the practical world a notch, tipping the spare quotidian into feeling.
In short: pictures of rooms that meet us halfway—calm but not cosy, precise without
fuss, the moment when the practical world turns quietly human.
Byron Houdayer, curator
My paintings require me to occupy space in a way that most people will be unaccustomed to. As a teenager I worked as a janitor to help pay my way through private high school. A janitor understands a room in a different way than the guests at a party. Perhaps the janitor inhabits the space when others have left, maybe even at night. A janitor is invisible. But in another way the janitor is a privileged visitor, hearing, seeing, and thinking with curiosity. If there are secrets in the carpet, walls, and dustbins, the janitor might find them. The secrets may be his own, as they come to light in the empty room.
I am a privileged visitor to the spaces I choose to paint. I only choose spaces that lead me away from the inconsiderate path of efficiency and thoughtless function. I am inefficient and considerate. What happens to an empty room when you spend time looking at it carefully in solitude? Does the room change? My paintings are reflective of these changes.They are personal, intimate; often I spend months or years within these rooms. I try to arrive at the qualities of things instead of their literal likeness, to see past appearances and make room for metaphor and association.
I choose spaces which reflect divergent stories. Dropped ceiling tiles in a gothic inspired church hallway, or an abandoned kitchen, which is part of my current studio and serves as a sculpture for holding morning light. Although I don’t always identify with the idea of “liminal space,” being in-between is an important part of my life, as these spaces are suspended in a question of meaning.
For me, light is alive and has personality. It physically alters everything it encounters. When I look at a white wall, I try to grasp its dual nature; how it’s a combination of a tangible object but also something immaterial and atmospheric. I see the warm penumbra on the edge of a shadow, and then it goes violet and then it turns a little green. These rich differences help create my sense of self; they reflect the nuance of my inner voice.
Emil Robinson
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