How to Like It by Lucy Robson delves into the cultural architectures of romantic desire

Artist Lucy Robson presents a new body of oil-on-linen paintings at Southern Guild’s Cape Town gallery with her show titled How to Like It, on view from May 28 – July 9, 2026. Through tightly framed and emotionally charged scenes, the art exhibition “unfolds as a sustained enquiry into the psychic and cultural architectures of romantic desire,” notes Southern Guild in the official press release.

“Her paintings stage scenes of heightened intimacy—tightly cropped, emotionally charged and formally seductive. They linger on singular fragments in time: a woman’s face cradled by the hands of an unnamed lover, her expression suspended between surrender and alarm; a pair of bare, sunburnt breasts, simultaneously offered up and withheld,” they continue. Drawing from films, 1990s fashion editorials and art history, the works repeatedly return to a blonde, blue-eyed figure whose familiarity becomes increasingly unsettled.

These compositions by the London-based artist position the viewer in proximity to their subjects, creating encounters that feel at once seductive and implicated. Rather than presenting desire as personal or spontaneous, the artworks suggest it is shaped through inherited ways of seeing, particularly the persistent representation of feminine ideals within Western visual culture.

Recurring motifs appear throughout the showcase. Flushed skin becomes a register of longing; hands, often belonging to unseen male figures, signal direction, possession or control. Domestic interiors move between comfort and containment. Although the paintings initially appear sensuous and indulgent, they gradually reveal a quieter tension beneath their polished surfaces.

“Central to the presentation is a hyperbolic, fatalistic idea of “love”—the pull toward desires that feel knowingly, almost willingly, self-destructive,” the South Africa-based art gallery relays. “Robson traces the cyclical progression between fantasy and its eventual undoing, where seduction gives way to projection and disillusionment. How to Like It interrogates the enduring scripts of Hollywood romance that continue to contour feminine subjectivity.”

The solo exhibition also turns to the vocabulary through which these desires are learned. Borrowing its title from the ‘instructional language’ of women’s magazines and aspirational lifestyle culture, How to Like It invokes the idea that intimacy, self-presentation and desire can be taught, refined and optimised. Robson treats this language less as guidance than as a form of conditioning—one that shapes how feminine desire is expressed and performed.

Robson’s paintings remain conscious of their own position within this visual economy. References to cinematic melodrama, including Far from Heaven (2002) and figures such as Margaux Hemingway, point to the distance between idealised femininity and lived experience.

Within carefully staged interiors informed by neo-noir atmospheres and echoes of A Doll's House (1879) by Henrik Ibsen, the home becomes less a place of refuge than a site of performance and constraint. Even as social conditions shift, the exhibition suggests that the narratives governing love, gender and desire remain surprisingly durable.

As Southern Guild explains, “In How to Like It, beauty operates as both entry point and trap. The material of paint becomes both image and artifice, seducing the viewer with its polished sheen before revealing something more foreboding beneath. The fantasy doesn’t simply collapse; it lingers, recalibrates and continues to exert its pull.”