Modern Times
1 – 24 October 2020
We are pleased to present Walter Robinson’s new solo exhibition at the gallery.
This new series of paintings is a continuation of his work of appropriating images. The presentation focuses on two series in particular, Still Lifes and Romance. In the first series, everyday consumer products (here medications and alcohol bottles) become magnified icons of desire in all their physical and aesthetic properties.
“These are not Cézanne’s apples considered as color and form but items consumed – not for their taste as much as for their effects on consciousness.”
In the painting Daily Medication, you can see the artist’s name on the labels of the pill boxes. Robinson therefore places himself in the position of consumer of these painkillers and, more broadly, of the products of a society of industrialized desire, which the philosopher Paul B. Preciado terms pharmacopornography.
Walter Robinson, Daily Medications, 2020
The new works in the Romance series (images appropriated from the covers of pulp books or erotic novels) again take up the themes of hospital environments and crimes of passion, thus mixing carnal desire, danger, and domination relationships. We note, however, that while earlier works highlighted models of passion, romance, love and desire, in his more recent paintings Robinson chooses scenarios where women are more often dominant in the power relationship.
“While they arguably remain projections of male sexuality, as such they suggest a male ambivalence, where fear is a positive aspect of the libidinal dynamic, an awareness that patriarchal power is under challenge and even ebbing away. (…) It may seem grandiose to give all this meaning to fantasy even comic illustrations, but they must sound some emotional resonance, even in their unreality.”
Robinson began painting in New York in the late 1970s and is now considered one of the pioneers of the Picture Generation. He was born in 1950 in Wilmington (DE) and grew up in Tulsa (OK). His work has recently been exhibited in the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), the Contemporary Art Museum of Geneva (MAMCO), the Swiss Institute NY, and the Hirshhorn Museum.
2020
Acrylic on canvas
183 × 122 cm / 72 × 48 in.
©Walter Robinson