Walter Robinson
New Paintings and Works on Paper, 2013-2020
Mazzoli Gallery, Modena
November 14, 2020 - January, 2021
Galleria Mazzoli presents Walter Robinson New Paintings and Works on Paper, 2013-2020. 15 large new paintings, including Robinson’s masterpiece Pulp Romance, and works on paper and canvas of various dimensions featuring dramatic images of hamburgers, cigarettes, lovers, painkillers, Warholian stacks of money, and Ferrari at the head of the pack!
As a critical analysis of Robinson's work, Galleria Mazzoli has published the monograph A Kiss Before Dying: Walter Robinson – A Painter of Pictures and Arbiter of Critical Pleasures by Richard Milazzo, (with an Italian translation by Ginevra Quadrio Curzio).
Both as the curator and the author of this major monograph on the artist, A Kiss Before Dying, Richard Milazzo writes: “I have tried to write a book that would give a comprehensive picture of this major and quintessential American artist who has functioned both as a painter and a critic (in the tradition of Fairfield Porter, but with a bite as big as his bark). Robinson, in his capacity of artist-as-critic, was one of the earliest and most seminal exponents of Picture Theory art, invested in the postmodern critique of representation, and yet who decided to paint rather than employ photography as his primary medium, even where many of his ‘paintings-as-pictures’ are based on photography and drawn from various photographic sources such as the covers of cheap romance and detective novels and the onslaught of images generated by the advertising industry. […] Few others have used painting as Robinson has, to critique the Spectacle of the photo-based world of images, but not without reasserting the values of sincerity of aesthetical purpose in a cynical culture, even bringing romance (impassioned emotion) to the table, no matter how sinister or lovingly portrayed.
“The fact that this critic-as-artist has also conducted a major career as a writer is extraordinary. Besides founding Art-Rite magazine with Edit DeAk and working for Art in America during its heyday, Robinson was a critical gadfly in the East Village during the 1980s, writing about its colorful characters and street life, and constructing by default a history of the scene there and in the Lower East Side of New York City. While these sectors of the City (and the South Bronx) were in severe social disarray, tragically afflicted by homelessness and AIDS, the period between 1982 and 1988 contributed to the paradigmatic reinvention of the art world. Robinson was a seminal part of this reenvisionment (sic), in terms of his painting, writing, and editing, having been the Art Editor of the East Village Eye, a short-lived, rambunctious and outré publication covering the arts in general. But it was for Art in America that he wrote, in collaboration with Carlo McCormick, his most controversial essay, ‘Slouching Toward Avenue D,’ which evoked the treacherous response from one of October magazine’s henchmen, Craig Owens.
“It is for these and many other reasons I felt it was necessary for Robinson, this Janus-configured artist-as-critic and critic-as-artist, to speak in his own voice. Hence, the many citations in the course of this monograph, not only his but others, as well, and the various ‘campaigns’ I have conducted in behalf of other artists, creating hopefully a critical cacophony dominated by no one, especially the author.”
The published monograph, in addition to the intensive critical and dialectical analysis of Walter Robinson’s paintings and writings (abundantly excerpted here), contains approximately 950 color and black and white illustrations, 44 full-color plate reproductions of the artist’s paintings and works on paper, a comprehensive history of his exhibitions, a selected bibliography, and an index of the works by the artist in the monograph.
Walter Robinson
A Kiss Before Dying
Essay by Richard Milazzo
626 pages, color images
500 numbered copies
Published by Mazzoli Gallery, Modena, 2020
WALTER ROBINSON was born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1950. He grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and moved to New York City to attend Columbia University, graduating in 1972. In 1973, he co-founded with Joshua Cohn and Edit DeAk the modest but legendary Art-Rite magazine, printed on newsprint and publishing many of the most important artists of the 1960s and ’70s. Art-Rite perished in 1978, the same year he became a Contributing Editor at Art in America, where he also compiled its monthly art newsletter and became the magazine’s News Editor. All the issues of Art-Rite were recently reprinted in a single volume and published by Printed Matter / Primary Information in 2019. Robinson worked at Art in America for nearly thirty years, leaving in 2009. He was among the earliest artists to show at Metro Pictures, and had his first one-person at the gallery in 1982. He also joined Colab, an artist collective, in 1980, and was included in such important and infamous exhibitions as the Times Square Show and the Real Estate Show. He became a vital part of the East Village in the 1980s, both as an artist and a critic, showing at Semaphore and Piezo Electric galleries, and becoming the Art Editor of the East Village Eye from 1983 to 1985. In 1996 he founded Artnet magazine and was its Editor until he left in 2012. Most recently, he had a major museum retrospective, Walter Robinson: Paintings and Other Indulgences, at the University Galleries of Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois, in 2014, which traveled to The Galleries at Moore College of Art & Design, Philadelphia, and to the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York, both in 2016. He lives and works in New York City.
MAZZOLI GALLERY
Via Nazario Sauro 62, 41121 Modena