Robin Tewes (born 1950) is a Queens-born, New York City-based artist, known since the early 1980s for her representational paintings of frozen, narrative-like moments.Cook, Scott. "Art for the Eighties," New York City: Grace Borgenicht Gallery, 1980.Heil, Janet and Becky Saunders. Portraits on a Human Scale, catalogue, New York: The Whitney Museum of Art, 1983. She has shown her work in numerous solo exhibitions in New York City, as well as nationally and internationally, and exhibited at venues including P.S. 1, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, The Drawing Center, and the Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing), among many. Her work has been widely discussed in publications including Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, Tema Celeste,Damianovic, Maria. "Il Fantastico In Arte," Tema Celeste, #55, 1995. the New York Times,Johnson, Ken. "Robin Tewes," The New York Times, April 30, 1999. the Los Angeles Times,Wilson, William. "Wry and Witty Observations," Los Angeles Times, May 1, 1996. and the Village Voice. Tewes was a founding member of the P.S. 122 Painting Association. She has been recognized with a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship (2015) and Painting Award (2008),The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Robin Tewes. Retrieved April 23, 2018. an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award (2007), and inclusion in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in 2016.Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Robin Tewes papers, 1950–2016. Retrieved April 18, 2018.
Tewes paints everyday people and domestic interiors in a precise, almost deadpan style that Artforum critic Ronny Cohen called "searingly direct" in its presentation of information and emotional impact.Cohen, Ronny. "Robin Tewes," Artforum, September, 1983, p. 73. She often incorporates subtle, graffiti-like text into her paintings, suggesting pointed or disquieting thoughts, conversations or social commentary on the scene being portrayed. ARTnews Barbara Pollack described Tewes's work as maintaining "an edgy balance between surrealism and soap opera."Pollock, Barbara. "Robin Tewes," ARTnews, Summer, 1999. In addition to her art practice, Tewes has worked as an educator, lecturer, curator and activist.
Life and career Robin Tewes was born and raised in the working-class Richmond Hill, Queens neighborhood. She was interested in art from an early age and attended the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan, majoring in cartooning. After working and traveling, she attended Hunter College in New York City (BFA, 1978), where her key influences were narrative, representational artists such as Frida Kahlo and Edward Hopper, as well as the Surrealists.
After graduating, Tewes became involved with a group of young artists living and working on the poor-to-working class Lower East Side. Together, they founded the P.S. 122 Painting Association in 1979 and began renting classrooms in the abandoned P.S. 122 school, which they converted into studio spaces.Mazorati, Gerald. "Artpicks," SoHo Weekly News, June 24, 1980.Mazorati, Gerald. "The East Village Others," SoHo Weekly News, June 4, 1980. p. 8 That association, in existence today, evolved into the future Performance Space New York. During that time, Tewes also co-founded the artists collective, Fifth Street Gallery, one of the first on the Lower East Side.
Tewes began publicly exhibiting in 1978. In 1980, she was chosen for a show of young American painters in Caracas, Venezuela, and later for shows at the Grace Borgenicht and Stefanotti galleries, Weatherspoon Art Museum, and Whitney Museum, eventually earning her first major solo show at Josef Gallery (1983).Robin Tewes, artist website. In 1984, New York Times critic William Zimmer noted her "growing New York art world reputation."Zimmer, William. "Styles Designed to Capture Personalities," The New York Times, June 24, 1984. The attention brought solo exhibitions at the Bill Mayne and John Weber galleries (New York City), Faggionato Fine Arts (London), Art in General, and Rutgers University in the 1990s, and In the 2000s, at Adam Baumgold (New York City), Headbones (Canada), Queens College, Pace University, and Texas A&M University.
Tewes earned her MST in Visual Arts from Pace University in 2012. She has taught at colleges and universities around New York City since 1996, including Parsons School of Design, the Bard College Graduate Program, Hunter College, and Pace University (2005–2017). She is currently teaching at Buckley School in Manhattan, where she has taught since 2015. Tewes has a son, Dylan Marcus, who is a sound technology director in New York City.
Work In her early work, Tewes portrayed candid, accessible narrative moments, using snapshots of family and friends to represent the lives of people that critics observed, "rarely appear in fine art."Breger, Brian. "Exhibitions," Art/World, November 15, 1978. Working on paper, she often collaged patterned wrapping paper to serve as backgrounds for her interiors. In 1982, she wrote, "Painting is primarily a form of communication … I try to freeze people in the middle of feeling something, documenting through a fleeting personal moment, a specific time in history."Tewes, Robin. Artist statement, January, 1982. Artforums Ronny H. Cohen attempted to dub work like Tewes's—which sought to communicate in an immediate, accessible fashion to a wider audience—"energism," a label that never caught on with critics, who felt it was too elastic a concept.Findsen, Owen. "'Energism' Becomes a New Buzz Word for Art, Artists," Cincinnati Enquirer, October 2, 1981, p. B-11.Henry, Gerritt. "The First Energist Drawing Show," ARTnews, February 1982, p. 162.Larson, Kay. Review, New Yorker, November 16, 1981, p. 14.Abeln, Allie. "The Guerilla Inside Robin Tewes," The Borough Connector, November 12, 2013. Retrieved April 18, 2018.
Tewes's early paintings were described by some critics as incisive and oddly affecting.Nadelman, Cynthia. "New York Reviews," ARTnews, September, 1983, Vol. 82, No. 7, p. 190. They investigated social relationships in commonplace family or leisure situations, as in Moose Club Gambling (1978) or The Livingroom Couch (1982), which depicts a middle-class couple slumped on a sofa in their no-frills home; the woman stares out ambiguously, perhaps as one critic noted, leaving the final word on their lives to a half-empty/half-full glass at the edge of the picture's foreground.
Ronny Cohen called Tewes's style illustrative, precise and realist,Cohen, Ronny. "Energism and Attitude," Artforum, September, 1980, p.17–23. but others like Brian Breger observed that she avoided "the frigid exactness of the super-realists" by capturing the warmth, humor and emotional depths of her subjects.Raynor, Vivien. "Downtown Art Come Uptown," The New York Times, June 26, 1981.Ratcliff, Carter. "Episodes," New York: Grace Borgenicht Gallery, catalogue, June, 1981. According to critic Scott Cook, her style largely masked the degree to which—unlike photorealist painters— she altered and supplemented her environments and compositions, a process of construction, according to imagination, rather than replication. Cohen suggested it was a "new kind of documentary painting," partaking of 20th-century American social realism, refracted through Pop's interest in the everyday and through Minimalist refinement.Cohen, Ronny. 26 Paintings: Robin Tewes, New York: Hanging Loose Press, 1982.
Rooms Without People works Tewes's environments became increasingly refined in the 1990s through the influence of Japanese art and minimalists like Agnes Martin. Less figurative, with pristine, 1950s-like interiors, they were painted in a deadpan style recalling Magritte. ARTnews critic Barbara Pollack described them as "pretty as bonbons, potent as cherry bombs" and Roberta Smith of The New York Times noted their sense of color and detail.Smith, Roberta. "Shades of a Rebirth for Painting," The New York Times, June 18, 1993, p. C28.The New Yorker, Reviews, The New Yorker, June 27/July 4, 1994. Nonetheless, critics observed that these intimately scaled, frozen moments also conveyed a stifling hermeticism in which "domesticity becomes terrifying."Schaffner, Ingrid. "Robin Tewes at Bill Maynes Contemporary Art," Artforum, April, 1996.McDowell, Deborah."Tewes Evocative Paintings," The Independent, June 9, 1994, p. 29. Details such as empty chairs, rugs resembling black holes, empty mirrors, switched-on lights, smoking cigarettes, and strewn toys in vacant rooms conveyed a sense of absence, silence, or speechlessness in the lives of unseen inhabitants.
Tewes explained, "I'm interested in that subconscious current. I think about things unspoken … the energy left in a room after a certain conversation." At times that energy took the form of scratched, nearly invisible graffiti on walls, floors and furniture. Critics speculated that the ambiguous scribbles might represent plaintive, rueful traces of recent exchanges, thought projections, or conversations to come, intimating marital discord, sexual tension, irreconcilable disputes, and lonely childhoods.Princenthal, Nancy. "Artists Book Beat," On Paper, Sept.–Oct., 1997, Vol. 2, No. 1. The Village Voice described the effect as one of the décor erupting "in silent but virulent outbursts and erotic daydreams."Levin, Kim. "Voice Choices Short List," The Village Voice, May 4, 1999. Inanimate Conversations (2002) portrays a one-eyed teddy bear and a doll, intruded upon by intense graffiti implying an absent child subject to such discussions;Kolva, Jeanne. "Picture Perfect," The Daily Targum, Inside Art, Jan 25, 1996. in I'm Not Home Please Leave a Message (1999), a boy lies on an adult bed next to an answering machine, surrounded by the searing, scrawled accusations of his separated parents.
In other paintings, Tewes decorated rooms with Rorschach-style marks or camouflage, that critics like Artforum'''s Ingrid Schaffner suggested were metaphors for the home as a screen for projecting primal emotionsHumphrey, David. "A Self Portrait the Town a Window," New York Fax, Art Issues, #34, 1994 or "a demilitarized zone" littered with land mines of secrets, lies, and broken promises. Schaffner glimpsed signs of escape through "imaginative enterprise" in Tewes's depictions of children absorbed in drawing or shadow puppets, contra their surroundings, however others like the Los Angeles Times' William Wilson saw in the work a wry, but dispiriting commentary on bourgeois existence.
Later work In 2006, the Village Voice described Tewes' new work as deceptive, with a "thrift-shop" ordinariness masking formal sophistication paired with overt, ironic, sociopolitical content.Baker, R.C. "Robin Tewes," review, The Village Voice, January 11–17, 2006. Works like 911 (2003), Bushwomanflagbrickwall (2005), and Another Tasteful Discussion of Contemporary War (2005) featured weapons-of-war shaped clouds, well-heeled couples sharing cocktails dwarfed by a looming, camouflage painting, and other direct references to real-world political events. In other works, gender politics dominated, with Tewes critiquing middle-class propriety with wallpaper patterned with explicit sexual acts, crumpled papers, scrawled messages, or women flashing their nude bodies from outside windows or pulled-back coats.Woods, Lynn. "Seeing isn't always believing," Hudson Valley One, Retrieved April 18, 2018.