Robin Tewes

Robin Tewes’ first solo show in New York was a timely reminder of her distinctive place in the ranks of younger American figurative painters. Since 1979, Tewes has developed a unique vision of people in everyday situations, notable for its searingly direct presentation of information and its strong emotional impact. She is among the small group of painters today who challenge viewers to see life as it is and not through the mitigating, cosmetic lens of the media.

Tewes uses photographs as reminders for her work, as do many of her contemporaries. Her sources are snapshots, in some cases taken by the artist herself, of family members, friends, and acquaintances. The people in her pictures belong to America’s working class, and so on one level her depictions of various social and leisure activities should be viewed as cultural documents of a rapidly changing socioeconomicgroup. Such paintings as Teenage Conversation, Dancers, Adult Conversation, Make-Out Party, and Sleeper are genre scenes in the venerable art-historical tradition of 17th-century Dutch and 19th-century French depictions of the working class, or of the early-20th-century American Ashcan School of social realism. Still, the “slice of life” narrative moments that Tewes chooses to represent are universal enough that we can all identify with them. In Teenage Conversation, for example, three teenagers are shown seated on a couch while another stands; the scene is a living room, ca. early ’60s. One boy in the group is showing off, up to adolescent mischief. In Sleeper, a woman is shown asleep with curlers in her hair.

However, what accounts for the penetrating force of Tewes’ pictures is her technique. The means is a startlingly energetic realism in which content and form are reinforced by the effective use of cropped and fragmented structures, photographic specificity, and collage. Tewes turns this mode to produce images that flash emotive messages in deceptively simple terms, which, however, resonate with symbolic significance. In Precious Little One, Tewes presents a baby girl dressed in her best, no doubt for the ritual of having her photograph taken. Depicted head-on, the baby is located against a collage background consisting of pink-and-white wrapping paper decorated with the words “Precious Little One”; her figure looms large, defiant and eerily iconic. It elicits a response ranging from feelings of sympathy to downright uneasiness, exposing family myths of “precious little ones.” The show as a whole revealed Tewes as very much in tune with the fast-time informational sensibility of the ’80s.

—Ronny Cohen