Basel Social Club

11 June – 18 June 2023

Franck Areal, Horburgstrasse 105, 4057 Basel, Switzerland

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Sébastien Bertrand and gallery Air de Paris are pleased to participate to the second edition of Basel Social Club with a selection of bed sheets paintings by American artist Walter Robinson (b. 1950).

Robinson has been at the forefront of the American art scene for decades, both as an art critic and artist. But it’s only in the last few years that his role as an artist has begun to be given the level of recognition and attention that it deserves.

Robison emerged in the 1980s alongside the likes of Cindy Sherman, Julian Schnabel, and Richard Prince as a key figure in the Pictures Generation – a group of American artists who were known for appropriating images from the mass media as a way of critically analyzing media culture. He describes the central theme of his work as being at base level about appetites, from the sexual to the culinary, which are at the very core of the mechanisms of desire and seduction that are throughout popular culture and the mass media as a way of attracting consumers.

Describing the patterned bed sheets he paints on as “a metaphor for the continuous field of consciousness,” Robinson says that “Bed sheets serve as an almost universal accessory to elemental manifestations of desire.”

“Also amusing is the thought that bed sheets are horizontal in the dark and hung vertical to dry in the sunshine,” he adds. “Nature is horizontal and culture is vertical, and a patterned bed sheet introduces the whimsical curlicues of the social imagination into the horizontal biological realm.”

The genius of Robinson’s work is the way it elucidates the mechanics and dynamics of the way we perceive and interpret the visual stimuli that we are fed every day through the outlets of popular culture and mass media that shape our actions as consumers and users. By filtering recognizable and familiar contemporary imagery through the prism of a “high art” painterly tradition, Robinson recontextualizes the subject matter to generate an entirely new and fresh frame of reference, prompting viewers to reconsider the way they process visual information. As the works in the bed-sheets paintings reveal, Robinson prompts and evokes his viewers to reanalyze and reevaluate their interactions with consumer and mass media imagery by confronting them with an entirely new image making convention. He does this by cohesively combining the seemingly incompatible traditions of popular culture and high culture, which although aesthetically and conceptually divergent, are actually both essentially products of the desire and seduction.

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