Man and Woman VI

In the 1960s and 1970s Philipson explored the division of the pictoral spaces in his works. 'In many of the Humankind paintings, the canvas is broken up to introduce totally different aspects of a subject. For instance, the paintings of black girl and white boy are sometimes balanced by a section of the painting which contains a zebra. The animal is used primarily as a pictorial device but the artist is also confirming the association with Africa and repeating the pattern of black and white' (see Exhibition catalogue, Robin Philipson Retrospective, Edinburgh, 1989, p. 8).