Walter Robinson (artist)

Walter Robinson (aka Mike Robinson, born 1950, Wilmington, Delaware) is a New York City-based painter, publisher, art curator and art writer.[1] He has been called a Neo-pop painter, as well as a member of the 1980s The Pictures Generation.[2][3]

Walter Robinson, New York State, 2012

Life and education

Robinson was born in Wilmington, Delaware, and raised in Tulsa. He moved to New York City to attend Columbia University in 1968.[4] Subsequently, he graduated from the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1973.[5] He lived in SoHo in the 1970s and on Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side in the 1980s and '90s,[6] and currently lives uptown with a studio in Long Island City in Queens.

Painting career

Robinson is a postmodern painter whose work features painterly images taken from covers of romance novel paperbacks as well as still lifes of cheeseburgers, French fries and beer, and pharmaceutical products like aspirin and nasal spray.[7] He also made and exhibited large-scale spin paintings in the mid-1980s, in advance of his colleague Damien Hirst.[8]

A 2014 touring exhibition of Robinson's paintings included more than 90 works dating from 1979 to 2014. It premiered at the University Galleries at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, and subsequently appeared in Philadelphia at the Moore College of Art.[9] The show's final stop was at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York City in September 2016.[10]

Robinson's works have been exhibited at several New York galleries since the 1980s, including Semaphore Gallery[11] and Metro Pictures Gallery.[12] An exhibition of his paintings, paired with a poem by Charles Bukowski, There's a Bluebird in My Heart, was on view in Spring 2016 at Owen James Gallery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.[13]

Art criticism and other activities

Robinson began writing about art in the 1970s, when he co-founded with Edit DeAk the art zine Art-Rite[14][15] in New York's SoHo art district.[16]

He subsequently served as news editor of Art in America magazine (1980–96) and founding editor of Artnet Magazine (1996-2012).[17] In 2013-14 he was a columnist for Artspace.com, where his essay on Zombie Formalism appeared.[18] He also served as art editor of the East Village Eye in the early ‘80s.[19]

Robinson was also active in Collaborative Projects (aka Colab) in the early 1980s,[20] acting as president for a short time and participating in The Times Square Show.[21]

In the ‘90s he was a correspondent for GalleryBeat TV, a public-access television show.[22]

Footnotes
  1. Hager, Steve. Art After Midnight: The East Village Scene. St. Matins Press, 1986. p. 146
  2. Donald Kuspit, "Walter Robinson, Dorian Grey Gallery," Artforum International, Summer 2013, p. 360.
  3. Sarah Schmerler, "Walter Robinson at Lynch Tham," Art in America, Oct. 9, 2014
  4. Walter Robinson
  5. "Walter Robinson".
  6. Walter Robinson, "Kicked Out of 1993," Observer.com, Feb. 7, 2013
  7. "Walter Robinson: Paintings and Other Indulgences," ed. Barry Blinderman, 144 pp., University Galleries of Illinois State University, 2016
  8. Michelle Grabner, "Walter Robinson, University Galleries of Illinois State University," Artforum International, March 2015, p. 286
  9. Brian Boucher, Artnet News, Jan. 25, 2016
  10. Peter Schjeldahl, "Reality Principle," The New Yorker, Sept. 26, 2016, p. 10.
  11. Regan Upshaw, Walter Robinson at Semaphore, Art in America, Feb. 1985
  12. Brooks Adams, Walter Robinson at Metro Pictures New York, Art in America, May 1982, pp. 144-145
  13. "Charles Bukowski / Walter Robinson," Owen James Gallery
  14. Alan W. Moore, Art Worker: Doing Time in the New York Art World, Journal of Aesthetics & Protest Press, 2022, pp. 29, 56, 69, 75, 80, 89, 104-5, 109, 111
  15. Boch, Richard (2017). The Mudd Club. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House. p. 268. ISBN 978-1-62731-051-2. OCLC 972429558.
  16. David Frankel, The Rite Stuff: Art-Rite, Artforum International, January 2003
  17. Andrew Russeth, Art Net: The Life and Times of Walter Robinson, Observer.com, Jan. 24, 2012
  18. Walter Robinson, Flipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism, Artspace Magazine, April 3, 2014
  19. Claudia Eve Beauchesne, East Village Eye, Tunica Studio Magazine No. 4
  20. Max Schumann, ed., "A Book about Colab (and Related Activities)," Printed Matter, Inc., 2015.
  21. Alan W. Moore, Art Worker: Doing Time in the New York Art World, Journal of Aesthetics & Protest Press, 2022, pp. 29, 56, 69, 75, 80, 89, 104-5, 109, 111
  22. Joy Press, "I Dated Cindy Sherman," Salon.com, May 2, 2008

References
  • Walter Robinson in conversation at The Conversation website.
  • Walter Robinson interviewed by Phong Bui at the Brooklyn Rail
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