Charlie Chrobnik

Charlie Chrobnik is a British-Ukrainian artist working in London. He is currently pursuing his Masters in Painting at the Royal College of Art, having previously graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins. He was recently shortlisted for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2023 and he has shown his work in multiple group shows in London, most notably his recent inclusion in D Contemporary’s annual open call exhibition Passages.

Charlie is the awardee of the Royal College of Art Disabled Student Scholarship 2021-2023.

Charlie’s practice centers around vulnerability, shame and care. He explores diaristic narratives around illness and loss, identity and effeminacy, remembrance and transformation. Working in painting, collage and sculpture, he is interested in the intertextuality between his painting and its photographic documentation. Creating new spaces of becoming and questioning where the final work lies. Bodies he originally paints in realism, ultimately metamorphose and fall into palette knife-pulled bubblegum. Constant replication of similar effeminate figures and sickly fragmented bodies act as a way of avoiding erasure.

Charlie aims to capture a not so distant memory or a current state of being. He expresses these moments in a narrative that is non-chronological. Each work is a random wincing memory or moment of shame suddenly appearing for no tangible reason, those that blindside you in the shower or in the middle of brushing your teeth.