How Robin Winters Transforms Everyday Life Into Extraordinary Art
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- 6 min read
Michael Klein is best known for his work and achievements in the field of contemporary art. As both a dealer and curator, he has had a long and distinguished career as a New York gallery owner and director, representing an international roster of emerging and mid-career artists. He became the first in-house curator for Microsoft Corp.
Behind each image, a Robin Winters painting or sculpture, is a story. It is an ongoing one about making art, a dialogue between Winters and his audience. In fact, his career began with performances and each event embellished with objects of his own making.
His is the art of imagination, fantasy, and keen awareness of the complexities of contemporary life for a working artist. Winters was part of a new generation that was reinventing figurative art in many guises. He, like others in the 80s, posited a rejection of pure abstraction, Pop, and Minimal art. He was looking to build personal narratives using a myriad of styles and formats that were available to him. As an artist, he was, and is still today, keenly aware of the many social, economic, and political struggles through which we live. His art ultimately reflects on the day-to-day, whether it focuses on social inequality, economic survival, or the more personal issues of love and grief.
A writer for one of the art journals, Artforum, noted about Winters, “his preferred stance as artist/worker and enduring interest in hybrid art forms.” He produced performances with titles like Silence Food for Speechless Fools, 1976, or Why I am an Artist, 1980. His participation in Colab, an artist collaborative group, Collaborative Projects, founded in 1977, “advocating a form of cultural activism that was purely artist-driven, the group created artworks, negotiated venues, curated shows, and engaged in discourse that responded to the political themes and predicaments of their time.” Along with this are his ongoing efforts to collaborate with other artists at his studio in New York, where he staged exhibitions and performances. He sees the role of artist as creator, activist, and stage manager all rolled into one. In effect, in much of his work, he suggests the subject of painting or sculpture is very much the performer.
Moment of Truth, 1980, is illustrated here. The themes are death and life. Death is the skeleton with a heart, life is the bowing male figure. Two parts that all of us will play. Furthermore, Winters’ efforts are part of a larger transition in the 80s by artists moving away from abstraction, what many call Modernism, to Post Modernism, whereby the artist sought, as critic Kim Levin wrote in her collection of essays, Beyond Modernism, “the history of art in our century can be seen as an inexorable march toward abstraction and reduction, but it can also be seen as series of efforts at incorporating the realities of modern life into art to bridge the gap between art and life.” In this way, Winters is free to explore any and all means of representation, both symbolic, the skeleton, or real, the male figure. His art, his career, is very much the development of bodies of work, whether painting or sculpture, that always attempt to bridge that gap.
Representation is not just pictorial. Winters is adept at written abstractions like River of Names, 1986, an encyclopedia of friends, relatives, and colleagues, or language integrated into room-size installations for exhibitions in New York, Chicago, Boston, and many venues in Europe.
Vermillion Years, one such installation, represents that ability and vision. This series combines many aspects of Winters’ thinking, glass sculpture, works on paper, words and pictures both, and furniture. Each table is a unique assemblage of individual parts. Winters explained, “After visiting Victor Hugo’s house in Paris, he, Hugo, had designed his own furniture, including a writing desk.” Inspired by what he had seen in Paris, Winters enlisted a colleague to build a series of eleven wooden tables to his specifications. Each of the tables was surmounted by a colored glass vase, and each table had a drawer filled with drawings and other works on paper. Over time, each owner received more works of art to add to the drawer, defining an ongoing dialogue between artist and collector, like letters from a pen pal. Made and shown in 1990, they are now all in museum collections across the country.
A new viewer of his work might call it childlike and naïve, but further study shows his drawings and paintings are highly refined and handsomely executed in the end. His repertoire includes faces, heads, bodies, various animals, and even robots, each with a dreamlike aura, as if we witness the artist’s imagination unfolding before us. As one critic put it so well in a review,
What is most impressive and rejuvenating about Winters’ way of working is the invariable effect his personality has on his projects. They are simultaneously touching and intelligent without being pretentious or grand. Winters’ knowledge and technical skills, and his mirthful, confounding “art and life” juxtapositions contradict and enrich our understanding of both.
He is one of the few artists who can easily navigate between two-dimensional works and three-dimensional inventions akin to artists of an older generation such as Jonathan Borofsky and Paul Thek. The series of thirty-three bronze heads and figures, Bronzing (ringing), 1989-2025, is cast in bronze and aqua resin. The figures are arranged in a circle as if in dialogue with each other or participating in some ceremony. Winters shaped and carved these dark sculptures as unique characters, each sophisticated and primitive at the same time. Think Picasso and/or Giacometti. Exaggerated in their being, some tall, others small, all are statements about human beings as unique and remarkable creatures drawn from his imagination.
His very personal exploration of life is never restricted by style, technique, or materials. He adapts what he needs to fulfill his vision, whether this is the field of colors to build and describe a landscape, collage elements for a work on paper, or shaping sculpture in bronze or glass. He always explores a wide range of mediums and materials. Life is experience, and he affords himself the ability to explore, experiment, and thereby achieve a great quantity of works varying in size, scale, and physical dimension.
More recently, the scale of paintings has grown, verging on monumental, as illustrated in two works here, The Never Ending Story, 2024, and Mark Twain in Egypt, done the same year. Each measures over 12 feet in width. Very much in keeping with Winters’ process, the techniques used involved a variety of materials that stain the surface so that the narrative is cloaked in the action of drawing and painting with disparate colors. We are seeing time unfold and imagery appear and disappear as if caught in a whirlwind, cycles of life represented by Winters’ very much a never-ending story.
In the painting about Egypt, Winters paints one of the ancient pyramids in profile, but also the underground tombs and caverns of the pharaohs. The field is color coded like a map or puzzle, but no key to meanings is provided. Why Mark Twain? Perhaps Twain is just another tourist looking to see and learn more about the mysteries of the pyramids and the culture of ancient Egypt. But in fact, Winters explained in a recent phone call, in Twain’s 1869 travel book The Innocents Abroad, the author wrote a satirical passage claiming that the Egyptian railroad used mummies as a cheap substitute for coal.
Winters surveys the world and then gives the viewer his interpretation of it in images that are real and recognizable. For Winters, art and art making are a process, a means to explain, to tell, or to report what he both sees and feels and wants to report to the viewer, all in the same breath, always excited and exuberant by what he has discovered and invented about the world and his part in it. From an interview in his catalogue Think Tank, he said, “It's important not to divide the world into black and white, or doctrinaire or ideological things, and remain open to human values.”
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Michael Klein, Owner & Director at Michael Klein Arts, LLC
Michael Klein's expertise lies in his role as a private art dealer and freelance, independent curator for individuals, institutions, and arts organizations. Today, Michael Klein Arts works with a diverse group of artists, estates, galleries, and non-profit institutions, providing management, curatorial, and other consulting services. At the same time, the company serves institutional as well as private collectors, focusing on developing collections of emerging, mid-career, and established artists. The company also organizes traveling exhibitions both in the United States and abroad.
