Shirt Paintings
Charlie James Gallery is delighted to present Shirt Paintings, a solo exhibition by New York based artist and critic Walter Robinson. The show will present thirteen of Walter’s 28 x 28 inch acrylic on canvas Shirt Paintings, as well as a series of 10 works on paper from his Normcore series of painted clothing advertisements. This is to be Walter’s first solo show in Los Angeles since 1985.
Words from the artist on the show:
"The shirt paintings are about abstraction, the kind of painting featured in the now-forgotten “Structure of Color” exhibition organized by Marcia Tucker at the Whitney in 1971, including artists ranging from Rothko and Newman to Frankenthaler, Noland and Morris to Stella, Marden and William T. Williams. The shirt paintings are a way of joining that club, that spiritual quest, while at the same time making a joke about it all, the kind of wit in which Freud saw signs from the unconscious.
Of course as abstractions the shirt paintings are poised very much on the threshold between the spiritual and material worlds. It tickles me, the notion of dressing in abstract patterns, which in addition to serving a mundane decorative function also might signal some kind of cosmological order. A plaid may not reach to a heavenly gyre but it certainly can indicate an ancient genealogy. It’s an atavistic anthropology of dress.
The shirt paintings are an extension of the “normcore” series of paintings based on figures and such taken from department store ads and mail-order catalogues. In general this kind of material comes already designed for visual appeal, and already designed to sell (thus relieving me of those obligations). Typically these works partake in various ways in what I like to think of as the consumerist utopia, where all good things dwell, at the same time that the polymorphously perverse sometimes manages to peek through."
Walter Robinson was born in 1950 and has lived and worked in New York City since 1968. In 1973 he launched Art-Rite magazine with two collaborators, publishing irregularly until 1977. During the same period he was a co-founder of Printed Matter, and somewhat later served as a correspondent for the cable TV show “Art TV Gallery Beat.” He began exhibiting his paintings in earnest with Collaborative Projects, participating in “The Real Estate Show” and “The Times Square Show” in 1980. In 1982 he had his first exhibition with Metro Pictures, and later showed at galleries in the East Village and elsewhere. He wrote reviews and art news for Art in America until 1996, when he became founding editor of Artnet Magazine, a post he held until 2012. A retrospective of his paintings opened at Illinois State University in Normal, IL, in 2014, traveling to the Galleries at Moore in Philadelphia, and debuting the new Jeffrey Deitch gallery in Soho in 2016. He has exhibited internationally at Galerie Bertrand in Geneva, Stems Gallery in Brussels, Inna Art Space in Hangzhou, China, Vito Schnabel in St. Moritz, Switzerland, and Vogt Gallery on Madison Avenue. In 2017 his work was included in “Fast Forward: Work from the 1980s” at the Whitney Museum. His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in NY, and many other public collections. He lives and works in NY.
Selected Works
Installation
