Walter Robinson, sharp-eyed painter and critic, has died, aged 74

The artist and author Walter Robinson—identified for creating brilliant and dryly humourous work, and for writing incisive and typically irreverent musings on the New York artwork world—has died, aged 74. The artist’s spouse, the portray conservator Lisa Rosen, informed Artnet Information that Robinson died from liver most cancers. He’s survived by Rosen, his daughter and two grandchildren.

In a press release to The Artwork Newspaper, a consultant of the gallery Sébastien Bertrand in Geneva, which has represented Robinson since 2016 and has held 4 solo exhibitions of his work, says Robinson was a “cherished artist whose daring imaginative and prescient and distinct voice have left an indelible mark on up to date artwork”.

“In instances when ego and self-celebration prevail, his modesty and willingness to push others ahead won’t ever be forgotten,” the consultant provides. “Walter was an excellent multi-faceted artist. In his creative observe, he translated the visible language of consumerism and need into works that had been as thought-provoking as they had been visually charming. His means to raise the on a regular basis and discover the boundaries between excessive and low tradition made his work timeless and resonant.”

Robinson was born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1950, and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He got here to New York in 1968 to review psychology and artwork historical past at Columbia College and lived and labored within the metropolis for the remainder of his life. In 1972, he enrolled within the Whitney Museum of American Artwork’s Unbiased Research Program as an artwork critic. Across the identical time, he started enhancing the artwork journal Artwork-Ceremony, a periodical revealed between 1973 and 1978 that featured nameless writings on the New York Metropolis artwork scene.

Alongside artists and writers like Sol LeWitt and Lucy Lippard, Robinson co-founded the non-profit Printed Matter in 1976, an organisation that presents artists’ books as standalone artistic endeavors. The seminal non-profit was one of many first to concentrate on publishing and distributing artists’ books, and celebrated for permitting artists to take over their very own manufacturing. It turned a non-profit in 1978 and moved to its current storefront in Chelsea in 2019.

Across the time of Printed Matter’s launch, Robinson turned a part of Collaborative Initiatives, a collective whose members included artists like Kiki Smith, Jenny Holzer and others. They banded collectively to provide their very own exhibitions and lift their very own funds, taking a community-minded method to artwork initiatives.

As an artist, within the Nineteen Seventies Robinson started producing emotionally-charged work within the fashion of pulp fiction detective novel covers from the Forties and 50s. He was a member of the Photos Technology, creating work that aimed to reject “the avant-garde, posing and phoniness”, he stated in an interview with the Whitney Museum in 2017.

Robinson stated his work aimed to embrace themes associated to “evolution, biology and need, which underlies every thing ultimately”. He typically painted on bedsheets, a observe he attributed to being influenced by the German artist Sigmar Polke, who typically painted on materials. Girls, {couples} embracing and on a regular basis objects like beer bottles and cheeseburgers are some widespread motifs in his work.

Robinson’s work is held in a number of museum collections, together with the Crocker Artwork Museum in Sacramento, and the Whitney and the Museum of Fashionable Artwork in New York—the latter of which holds a music video he co-directed for the influential punk band Suicide, known as Frankie Teardrop (1978).

As a author and editor, Robinson labored for East Village Eye within the Nineteen Eighties and was a information editor for Artwork in America between 1980 and 1996. He turned the founding editor of Artnet Journal in 1995, one of many first on-line artwork publications, which helped launch the careers of a number of well-known artwork writers and critics like Jerry Saltz, who informed the New York Observer that Robinson had “one of the crucial munificent, open-minded, sharp-eyed takes on the artwork world”.

From 1993 to 2000, Robinson, Paul Hasegawa-Overacker and Cathy Lebowitz ran GalleryBeat TV, a gonzo-style public entry present the place the trio supplied commentary on up to date artwork happenings across the metropolis (and had been typically ejected from the areas they had been capturing). The present, as soon as known as “idiotic” by Julian Schnabel, ran for 130 episodes and featured artists like Brice Marden, the Guerrilla Women, Cindy Sherman and others.

When Artnet Journal closed in 2012, Robinson returned his consideration to portray and had a late-career resurgence. He had a retrospective in 2014 that travelled from the College Galleries of Illinois State College to different venues. In 2016, Robinson had a retrospective with Jeffrey Deitch in New York, and a solo exhibition at Vito Schnabel in St Moritz in 2017.

In 2013-14, Robinson was a columnist for Artspace. In his 2014 essay “Flipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism”, he coined the time period “Zombie Formalism”, a disparaging time period to explain a specific kind of summary portray seemingly created particularly to cater to the artwork market’s tastes of the second.

Though Robinson maintained a studio observe all through his life, he didn’t think about himself an achieved artist. In an aforementioned interview with the Observer, he stated: “I didn’t turn into a profitable artist as a result of I didn’t need it sufficient. Typically it looks like you need to really need one thing to get it. Different instances it looks like it’s handed to you on a silver platter.”