Robin Winters

Present Company is pleased to announce Free Standing Sentence, a solo exhibition by Robin Winters. A visual provocateur whose practice spans 40+ years, Robin’s work has touched nearly every aspect of the art world - commercial, institutional, independent, and educational - while utilizing nearly ever mode of artistic production - performance art, film, video, writing prose and poetry, photography, installation art, printmaking, drawing, painting, ceramic sculpture, bronze sculpture, and glassblowing.

For his first solo show with Present Company, Robin has installed a seamless floating shelf that wraps the perimeter of the gallery and filled it with a collection drawings, paintings, and sculptures. Interspersed among the objects are a series of word/phrase labels held in place by small lumps of play-doh. Individually the labels act as captions for the objects they accompany. As a whole the installation reads as a run-on sentence with the drawings, paintings, and sculptures acting as the commas, semi colons, and quotation marks. A poem written by Winters and installed near the entrance of the gallery is both a self-portrait and biography of the artist’s life and career.

(excerpt)

Here I am for life, a maker (A life full of moments of breath and sky)

My work moves in circles both human and abstract (so many versions of space)

After all as Sun Ra said, “Space is the place” (so many sleek colorful space ships)

I do not remember the dates of anything that I ever made (too many questions)

I remember everything I have ever experienced (animals people places and nature)

It is all a blur (actually a dance of attempting to remember all that is forgotten)

One long questioning road of pain and pleasure mixed in a blender (shake it up)

Robin Winters came of age in late 1960s San Francisco, when practitioners of Bay Area Figuration coexisted with a burgeoning group of California conceptualists, and all were energized by the countercultural ferment of the era. In 1972, Winters moved to New York, where he became a fixture of the Downtown scene, performing and exhibiting in the City and internationally. Winters was a founding member of Colab, the artists’ collective behind such seminal exhibitions as The Real Estate Show and The Times Square Show. A recipient of an NEA grant and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Fine Arts, Winters’ work is in the permanent collections of many museums, including, but not limited to: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The New Museum, New York; The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; The Smithsonian Museum, Washington DC; The Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; The Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley; The Stedelijk Musem, Amsterdam; Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam.