The Pink Bear sits at the centre of LUAP’s practice, appearing across Painting, Photography, Sculpture, Performance and Installation. Acting as both alter ego and emotional cipher, the figure creates a space to explore memory, identity, vulnerability and the tension between outward appearance and internal experience.
Placed within remote landscapes, architectural spaces and unexpected environments, The Pink Bear shifts between familiarity and dislocation. Its playful form is deliberately at odds with the psychological weight carried by the work, allowing complex emotional states to surface through an image that initially appears accessible. Across LUAP’s evolving body of work, the character remains a constant presence through which personal experience can become something more universal.
Fortnum & Mason commissions LUAP to create Finding Light in Darkness for its Unleash the Love campaign, curated by Gone Rogue. The commission grows from LUAP’s recurring exploration of love, connection and the psychological movement between darkness and light.
My Head Feels Clear When I Am Outside at Winter Sculpture Park
LUAP presents My Head Feels Clear When I Am Outside at Gallery No.32’s Winter Sculpture Park in Bexley. The 2.4 × 2.4 metre work is his first large-scale Pink Bear head and first outdoor Sculpture, extending the figure from image and object into the landscape.
LUAP presents Self Incarceration, developed during a Residency inside a former police station in Hampstead. The Installation explores human caged potential and how fear, trauma and our own feelings can incarcerate us even when the possibility of escape remains open.
Fulham Town Hall opens its doors to the public in May 2021 for the first time in a decade. For Art in the Age of Now, LUAP is given an open brief and a former holding cell in the basement, using the building itself as the starting point for a new sculptural Installation.
LUAP paints Love Life, a 12 × 6 m Mural on Batemans Row in Shoreditch, supported by Outside the Zone. The Pink Bear holds a skull with heart-shaped eyes, bringing mortality, choice and the value of time into one image.
What Was Dark Has Become Light, And What Was Light Has Become Dark
I Used To Be A Polar Bear,
2020,
C-Type Print,
184cm x 123cm,
Photography
The fire dances in the dark shadows of the forest bringing light and warmth. The final fragments of daylight melt away into the encroaching silhouettes of the trees. What was light has become dark, and what was dark has become light.
The Plastic Flood for Let’s Live With Less Plastic
LUAP’s The Plastic Flood appears on digital billboards across the UK for Let’s Live With Less Plastic, curated by Tia Grazette for Plastic Free July. The Photography confronts the growing environmental cost of disposable plastic and waste.
Unrealistic Expectations,
2020,
C-Type Print,
60cm x 180cm,
Photography
A female figure is styled and posed as a doll alongside LUAP’s Pink Bear, creating a surreal image that explores beauty, identity, performance and the construction of appearance.
LUAP donated Purple Star Light, a 60 × 40 cm C-Type Print mounted on Aluminium, to the 2019 Terrence Higgins Trust Auction at Christie’s. Photographed in New Zealand for I Used To Be A Polar Bear, the work marked his third consecutive year supporting the charity.
LUAP presents Plastic Reality in Shepherd Market, Mayfair, a large-scale Intervention that turns The Pink Bear’s own artificiality back on the natural world. The work asks what happens when manufactured versions of nature become more familiar than the living things they imitate.
Well Hung are delighted to announce a group ‘paste up’ exhibition with artists; A.CE, Ben Rider, Donk, Hin, Luap, My Dog Sighs, Pablo Delgado and Shuby.
LUAP supports the inaugural Holiday House London, bringing The Pink Bear into a major interior design showcase raising funds for breast cancer research. The cause has a personal significance following the loss of LUAP’s Nanna to breast cancer.
LUAP creates Home Is A Feeling, a Public Art project supporting New Hope Animal Rescue and Furry Friends Animal Rescue. Featuring The Pink Bear with LUAP’s cat Nipper, the project brings together a large-scale Mural and limited-edition Prints to raise funds and awareness for animal welfare.
Recollection Of Innocence for Street Children in Nepal
LUAP revisits Recollection Of Innocence, originally created as a large-scale Mural in Germany, for a limited-edition scarf made with SKOG42 and Mala & Mad to support children in Nepal.
Home House commissions LUAP to create I ♥ Day Dreaming, an 8 × 4 m Mural for its private members’ club in Portman Square, London. The work brings one of the earliest Pink Bear photographs into the Georgian interior at architectural scale.
I was invited by the OXO Tower Brasserie to take over their gallery viewing gallery with my Pink Bear with the brief of creating something unlike anything they have seen in OXO before.
LUAP’s Williams Bear G has been exhibited at Christie’s King Street alongside works by Anish Kapoor, Yinka Shonibare and Howard Hodgkin, before selling for three times its listed price in support of Terrence Higgins Trust.
In summer 2014 I was introduced to the eclectic and luxuriously opulent private members club, Home House. The grandeur of the building blew me away. Art adorned the walls of each completely unique room, ranging in styles from 18th century splendour to 21st century avant-garde.
Moxy Hotels, Marriott International’s Bold Experiential Brand, Debuts Moxy Berlin Ostbahnhof With No-Holds-Barred Party Celebrating the Capital’s Prolific Underground Nightlife Scene, Creativity and Energy.
Pink Bear at the Moxy Hotel in Berlin - Uber Cool!
I recently submitted a proposal through Talent House to create a Pink Bear artwork for the new Moxy Ostbahnhof Hotel as part of their brand launch. My proposal was accepted and is now hanging pride of place in their lobby.
My Interview on Talenthouse - Get To Know : Paul Robinson & his new gallery showing
Rising UK artist and our very own Talenthouse Artist, Paul Robinson aka LUAP has continued to find artistic success with his signature pink bear. Since our last interview with him over a year ago, Robinson's career has risen leaps and bounds, from small exhibits to collaborating with TV stars and showcasing his work in the Andipa Gallery in London. A huge milestone for any artist. Robinson took some time out of his busy schedule to let us know more about his new exhibit “The Hero’s Journey” at Andipa (open until August 6th, go check it out), his future plans and advice for artists trying to get their work into galleries.
In his debut solo exhibition with Andipa Gallery titled ‘A Hero’s Journey’, New Contemporary artist Paul Robinson produces a vivid collection of paintings, photography and unique prints telling the fantastical story of alter ego Pink Bear.
My Interview on Artjobs - THE PINK BEAR. THE EXTRAORDINARY JOURNEY OF AN ALTER EGO
"The most pertinent painting is one I created in 2015 called “Me & My Shadow”. The painting is about being lost in the abyss of ones mind, travelling down a seemingly endless road, only accompanied by your shadow which is representative of the unconscious, which can include both positives and negative aspects of the ego"
Pink Bear is getting his own show. The Andipa Gallery in Knightsbridge - which is well known for it’s huge collection of Banksy’s - will be showing a curated collection of my paintings, prints and photography in July.
Unrealistic Expectations,
2014,
C-Type Print,
40cm x 60cm,
Photography
She lay on her back in the forest. The dark leafy canopy directly above. She opens her mouth to scream, but instead of sound escaping from her mouth, large clouds of white smoke billow from her mouth filling the forest.
A 6am start & the team of 53 was pumped & raring to go...Vanessa Von Tain arrived fresh as a daisy in her Rock 'N' Roll outfit. Louise Thompson in her rose gold tipped trainers. We all scrambled into Starbucks for a caffeine fix, before turning it into a makeshift beauty salon. We then moved to Sketch.
The Pink Bear Makes Its Music Video Debut with DogHaus
The Pink Bear makes its first music video appearance in DogHaus’s Down & Dirty, directed by Tom Gorst. The cameo places the figure inside a surreal club sequence and marks a new kind of cultural collaboration for LUAP.
Artist Paul Robinson to be exhibited at two of London's most stylish venues – Belgraves Hotel & Ramusake
Paul Robinson – an emerging contemporary artist – has been selected by A Space for Art to exhibit at luxury London hotel, Belgraves, & hip Japanese nightspot, Ramusake.
Cara Delevingne, Sophia Kerrison and Kids of Dada select LUAP’s Fail Guard Screen Print for Art4Animals, an international project developed with Talenthouse. The work will be released as part of a 16-artist limited-edition collection supporting New Hope Animal Rescue.
LUAP creates Recollection Of Innocence, a large-scale Mural for SKOG42 in Karlsruhe, Germany. Developed from original Photography of The Pink Bear, the work combines halftone, pattern and layered paint across the store’s interior wall.
LUAP takes The Pink Bear to Hong Kong in 2013, presenting Paintings at HK Contemporary Art Fair and creating a new body of Photography across the city.
