Robert McNally & Charlie Roberts: Tired Horses

Ancient antiquities, drooping flowers and faces sketched in thick squiggles of toothpaste. An artist obsessed with painting self-portraits. Tired Horses, a duo exhibition by Robert McNally and Charlie Roberts at Kristin Hjellegjerde, Berlin takes a deep dive into the artist’s psyche, exploring what it takes to sustain a creative life.

 

The exhibition title references All the Tired Horses by Bob Dylan and the German short film of the same name by Sebastian Mayr. Repeating the lyrics ‘All the tired horses in the sun / How am I supposed to get any riding done?’ the song reflects a feeling of creative frustration and exhaustion that Dylan felt at the time, while the film is a meditation on intimacy, on what we choose to reveal and to withhold. Taken together, these references frame the exhibition as a reflection not only on artistic fatigue, but on the persistence of making in spite of it – an idea which sits at the centre of McNally and Roberts’ dialogue.

 

Interested in the tension between knowing and unknowing, intimacy and distance, constraint and chaos, McNally’s work typically evolves from periods of isolation which allow him to withdraw deep into his own thoughts and archive of collected images. For this exhibition, he returns to a period of artistic struggle, when he was living in Berlin and making time-intensive pencil drawings as well as experimenting with toothpaste as material, which he tried and failed to preserve except through photographs. Those images are reimagined here in acrylic paint – impermanence rendered permanent – where the toothpaste takes on an even more glossy appearance, tracing the outline of a face drawn from antiquity or a caricature, or becoming sculptural in its own right, forming the stem of a drooping flower in a pair of paintings reflecting daytime and nighttime, not just temporally but as psychological states. McNally is heavily reliant on what he calls the ‘subconscious drive’ and the mismatched shadow in the nighttime painting reflects this sense of something other revealing itself.

 

Alongside the toothpaste works are compositions more typical of McNally’s practice, layered with multiple perspectives, materialities, art historical references and ‘Easter eggs’  that connect one work to another. Touch and the act of making remain central, articulated through sculptural objects, a biro pen and a ripped image of an artist at work. In the artist’s hands, again subtly mismatched, one arm seemingly emerging from beyond the border, are a brush and scalpel, a palette smeared with paint and a blob of toothpaste. His intense focus is heightened by the cut out line around his face, dripping with blood. Here, the artist appears both immersed in and estranged from the act of making itself, caught between control and disintegration. 

 

If the figure of the artist in McNally’s painting suggests a slippage within the self, Roberts extends this experience outwards into the surrounding space. In his depiction of an artist’s studio, the artist has evolved into a cyborg-esque figure, with oversized, elongated limbs and a metallic helmet for a head. Images of his previous self are all around, most pointedly through a reflection in the mirror, which gazes past the robotic head out to the viewer, with an expression of unmistakable disgust. This jaded self is not the one we see depicted in the self-portraits, tacked to the paint splattered walls – those images are more youthful, as if the artist is stuck in a cycle that draws him continually back to the past.

 

The chaos of this scene contrasts the quiet interior spaces that Roberts typically paints, though the architecture still works to convey a sense of frustration or constraint. Take, for instance, the painting in which a tall figure stands backed into a corner of a doorless room – except, of course, if we count the tiny door-like opening at the base of a wooden stall, though this is only large enough for a mouse. The space itself is aesthetically pleasing, with the white panels evoking a grid-like, minimalist Japanese style: a vase of flowers, seedlings growing in tins, a dog asleep on a rug. Yet the lack of any real windows or external viewpoints is unsettling – we’re not sure how to interpret this space. The figure themself seems caught in a similar conundrum, their multiple limbs and two heads adding to the sense of the uncanny while also suggestive of repetitive motion. As with all of Roberts’ compositions, the narrative is left intentionally open: is the figure simply daydreaming or stuck in some kind of psychological loop? Is the space one of containment or order – and at which point does one tip into another? 

 

Across both artists’ work, repetition, doubling and spatial disorientation emerge as shared conditions of making, pointing less to stasis than to persistence. The act of return – whether to an image, space or material – becomes a gesture of hope and renewal.