As Walter Robinson’s paintings have evolved, they’ve come to serve as an uncannily accurate gauge for the American art world’s analogously shifting, and increasingly nuanced, attitudes toward consumerism and mass culture. The artist’s early-1980s works—straightforward depictions of drugstore purchases, Budweiser beer cans, a plastic My Little Pony figurine, and Robinson’s personal friends, the artists Martin Wong and Mike Bidlo and critic Carlo McCormick—feature banal subjects facilely scumbled in acrylic paint and initially registered as an ironic wink to the viewer. The portraits