Lucy Robson on her first solo exhibition with Southern Guild Cape Town: How to Like It

On 28 May 2026, Southern Guild Cape Town opened How to Like It, a solo exhibition of new oil-on-linen paintings by London-based artist Lucy Robson. The exhibition runs until 9 July 2026.

Lucy Robson is a London-based painter whose practice draws on photography, fashion imagery, and cinematic reference points to explore femininity, desire, and the emotional structures of romantic love. Her work is informed by pre-internet visual culture, nostalgia, and Girlhood, and often stages constructed scenes that sit between surface, symbol, and psychological tension.

In How to Like It, Lucy Robson presents new oil-on-linen paintings that examine the psychic and cultural architectures of romantic desire. Drawing from film, 90s fashion editorials, and art history, the works stage tightly cropped, emotionally charged scenes of intimacy where fragments of the body and gesture sit between attraction and unease.

A recurring blonde, blue-eyed subject anchors a voyeuristic gaze shaped by familiar Western representations of feminine beauty, where image, subject, and viewer continually fold into one another and shape how desire is seen.

Across the exhibition, motifs of flushed skin, gesturing hands, and domestic interiors shift between sensuality and confinement, tracing cycles of fantasy, projection, and disillusionment within the cultural scripts that structure romantic love and feminine subjectivity.

Join us as we unpack How to Like It in conversation with Robson, exploring the ideas that shape her practice.

By Khaya Mnisi

All images courtesy of Southern Guild & Lucy Robson

One thing I've noticed in conversations with artists is that a work can feel understood while it's still in the studio, but once it enters the world and people bring their own experiences to it, something shifts. New meanings emerge, unexpected interpretations surface, and sometimes the artist begins seeing things they hadn't fully recognised before. Did that happen with How to Like It? What, if anything, changed for you after the exhibition opened?

To be honest, these ideas are so deeply embedded. They've taken shape over years and even decades. Added to that, I live with these works for months and months. My relationship with my work is very personal and feels somewhat set by the time the paintings are being shown. I'm always really interested in the way the viewers receive the work, but more to say that the major shifts happen in the studio. What came up again and again at the opening was the scale, how unexpected it was. I think we've become so accustomed to encountering work on Instagram, which gives no real sense of size. I've loved working bigger, so I was really happy that it landed the way it did.

For you, was this exhibition a way of coming to terms with what shaped your own beauty ideals, whether from media, art, or other sources? And since you completed the work, has your own relationship to those standards changed? Have you found yourself moving toward a more personal or self-defined idea of beauty?

Similarly, this relationship with self, with beauty ideals, has evolved over a lifetime. There's no cure-all. The work is an enquiry, which I expect to be making for many years to come, not a fixer. If anything, seeing these ideals memorialised in this delicious art form, larger than life, reinvigorates their power. It's tricky, but these works don't offer resolution.

Image of Lucy Robson by Aniella Weinberger

There's no cure-all. The work is an enquiry, which I expect to be making for many years to come, not a fixer. If anything, seeing these ideals memorialised in this delicious art form, larger than life, reinvigorates their power. It's tricky, but these works don't offer resolution.

The exhibition is described as an enquiry into the psychic and cultural architectures of romantic desire. I'm curious whether visitors seemed to arrive carrying that same enquiry. Were there any conversations, reactions, or observations from viewers that stayed with you during the opening?

Romantic love — the highs and lows — is something most people can map onto their own lives. My perspective is so deeply female and I eat, sleep and breathe my work. That said, I'm always caught off guard when men describe the same experiences, the same longing. It's a good reminder that these things cut across more than I sometimes assume.

Title: A house divided against itself cannot stand

Title: Heart snatcher

The exhibition examines the ways our ideas about love, desire, and femininity can be shaped by inherited cultural narratives. Once we become aware of those influences, do you think that awareness changes anything, or are these stories powerful enough that we continue living through them even when we recognise them? Why do you think that happens? And for readers who may recognise that tension in their own lives, how would you explain it to them?

The work is made with an awareness of these inherited cultural narratives. I think some of what I'm trying to say is that these stories and fantasies have a certain power over us, even when we know they are there. I think that you can be acutely aware of the narrative forces operating inside your own life, as I think artists often are, and actively raise your consciousness, and be emotionally and intellectually evolved beyond the things you want. And still want them all the same. And what does that say about you — or me? I'm not sure I can explain that to anyone, really. I don't think it can be intellectualised or made small, and my own position is wobbling all the time. Searching for coherence, but wobbling all the same. My work asks the questions as they arise in my own life. I don't have the answer as yet.

Title: Girl Ablaze

Title: My Little Dove

I think that you can be acutely aware of the narrative forces operating inside your own life, as I think artists often are, and actively raise your consciousness, and be emotionally and intellectually evolved beyond the things you want. And still want them all the same. And what does that say about you — or me?

Title: I’ll Make You Fly

Title: How To Like It

This is your first solo exhibition with Southern Guild, and also your first solo exhibition in South Africa. What does this moment mean to you?

This is my first solo with Southern Guild, and my first solo in South Africa. It means a lot to be showing on home turf. I did my BA at Michaelis some years ago, so it feels like a full-circle moment. I really admire Southern Guild's programme and their ethos, so it's a joy to be showing with the gallery.

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