Author Description

By 1980 Walter Robinson (born 1950) had established himself as a critic for Art in America and member of the New York artists' collective Collaborative Projects. He became notable for paintings of square-jawed detective-hero types and swooning vixens based on pulp romance covers. Employing what critic Carlo McCormick termed a devious sense of irony done with incredible sincerity, he examined painting's relationship to mass-culture images of desire, mining lurid illustrations from the 1940s and 50s and rerepresenting them in a style culled from how to paint books. Robinson's subsequent paintings of beer cans and bottles, pharmaceuticals, fast-food burgers, Lands' End models and online erotic selfies continue to address our indulgence of longing and excess in a media-saturated world.