Walter Robinson
Tumultuous Heart
2017, Hand-Knotted wool, 72" x 72" edition of 15 + 3 APs This rug is available in custom sizes
Walter Robinson has worn several hats in the art world and sometimes it seems to be impossible for the art world to want to unpack his career as an artist without putting it into context of his stint as an influential art critic running artnet.com. He was on many annual lists of the most powerful figures in the art world. A few years ago, he resigned from Artnet to devote himself full time to painting. He has been called a "neo-Pop" painter and is a member of the 1980s "Picture Generation.” Robinson is finally getting the attention he deserves as an artist—including one person exhibitions with influential art dealer Jeffrey Deitch who recently mounted a retrospective in New York and an exhibition of new work in St. Moritz with Vito Schnabel. We were excited about Walter’s suggestion to make a spin-art rug. The result was the amazing phantasmagorical Tumultuous Heart rug. The rug is based on a body of spin-art paintings Robinson made in 1985-87, a solid ten years before Damien Hirst did. The New York Times critic Holland Cotter remarked of Robinson’s Spin-Art series, “The Kaleidoscopic splatter paintings that resulted burlesqued two kinds of American art at once—on the one hand, ‘action painting’ with its mystique of the organic individual touch; of the other the hippy aesthetic of the 60’s, with its democratic blurring of art and craft and its mandala obsessed acid-head spirituality—odd logical extension, it may now be seen, of the 50’s sublime.”
Walter Robinson moved to New York in 1968 to attend Columbia University, where he studied art history and psychology. After he graduated, in 1972, he enrolled in the Whitney Independent Study Program, and during the 1980s, he was a member of CoLab, an artist collective that included Kiki Smith and Jenny Holzer among many others. Robinson was a contributing editor at Art in America from 1978 to 1997, a cofounder (with Edit DeAk) of Art-Rite magazine in the 1970s, and the art editor of The East Village Eye through the 1980s. Later, he was the correspondent for “Art Gallery Beat” in the late 1990s and he is the author of Instant Art History (Ballantine, 1994).
He has exhibited his art at the New Museum and the Drawing Center in New York, among numerous other galleries, art fairs, and institutions. In 2016, Robinson had a retrospective at The Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York City and he has had recent solo exhibitions at Vito Schnabel Gallery, St. Moritz, Switzerland, Galerie Sébastien Bertrand, Geneva, Switzerland and Inna Art Space, Huangzhou, China
BravinLee editions is a proud member of GoodWeave. GoodWeave’s founder Kailash Satyarthi was recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in honor of his career dedicated to ending the exploitation of children around the world. GoodWeave, an international nonprofit organization geared toward abolishing child labor in the carpet industry, has liberated and educated thousands of children, bringing them from carpet looms to classrooms. Satyarthi and GoodWeave work to guide consumers to its Child Labor Free Certified rugs and replicate their market-based approach of certification in other sectors. Kailash said at the ceremony, “I refuse to accept that the shackles of slavery can ever be stronger than the quest for freedom.” He asked those in attendance to place their hands over their hearts and “listen to the child inside.”