Opening today at The Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick in Cleveland in collaboration with Brooklyn’s Stephen Romano Gallery is the first exhibition of British artist Ray Robinson’s series, The Third Door.

Read on for full details!

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In this exhibition of paintings produced between 2015 and 2016, the artist confronts his native England’s often difficult – and contentious history with witchcraft. A catalog with contributions from Alfred Rosenbluth, Charlotte Rodgers and Steven Intermill will accompany the exhibition.

“MERRIE ENGLAND 1657” 2015 THE TIME OF THE WITCH FINDER GENERAL – MATTHEW HOPKINS DURING THE COMMONWEALTH 1650’s

Ray Robinson was born in the UK in 1931 and began his professional career as a mathematician. Seeking a significant change of course in his life in his late 20s, Ray discovered the works of David Bomberg, Alberto Giacometti, Paul Cezanne. He was heavily impacted by their attempts to create a visually ordered perceptual space within their works, as well as seeking to create a visual immediacy through truth to materials.

This body of work is the exceptional, delving into dark corners such as witch burnings and hangings, demonic apparitions, paranormal visions, occult rituals, and the old religion. Ray Robinson’s affinity to these subjects germinates from him spending his summers as a young boy with his grandmother, who apprenticed him in the old ways of the witch.

The artist has spoken only occasionally of this immersive body of work, which is shrouded in mystery and atmosphere. Ray Robinson has said of The Third Door: “Witches? Poor Devils. Each of the paintings has a true circumstance…and the result of my ‘being there’ and so pass through the matrix of memory and through the archetype that defined the first vision and set our parameters.. To an inner meaning without external references. ‘When reason sleeps in the minds of the wise Witches burn and demons rise.”

The exhibition will open November 17th 2021 and continue through January 15 2022. For ticketing information visit bucklandmuseum.org. You can view the works on display and read more about Ray Robinson here.

“METAMORPHOSIS” 2015 THE SUN BEGAN TO RISE AND SHE TURNED TO STONE