Take a Walk to 18 Wooster Street in SoHo and Let The Music Play—or so says the title of Walter Robinson’s radical yet visually familiar exhibition of paintings at Jeffrey Deitch. Everything you know and love, like, dislike or simply dismiss about the world we live in is here. What’s also here is a body of work by an artist who loved to paint. Robinson certainly knew how to handle a paintbrush, and when it came to moving and pushing paint around a canvas or a sheet of paper, he could do no wrong. 

Born in 1950 in Wilmington, DE, Walter Robinson was a painter, publisher, art curator and writer, and did it all with not just purpose, but with a heartfelt love for whatever he was doing. Those are the qualities along with the quirks that are on full display in Robinson’s paintings at Jeffrey Deitch. The exhibition offers a wide range of imagery drawn from decades of Pop culture inundation as it reveals the irony, humor, beauty and pulp sensuality of what we tend to take for granted but oftentimes can’t live without.

Walter Robinson, Unidentified Cheeseburger, 2018. Photography by Genevive Hanson

The paintings look easy—the brushwork seemingly slap-dash—yet executed with an expressively focused application and style. It’s a writer’s style—someone who loves language and history, while allowing bits and pieces of thought and action to create images that jump from the page or, in this case, from the canvas. Paintings of burgers and fries, kittens and liquor bottles share the gallery walls with images of hot nurses and pulp fiction romance. This is a visionary strip mall of imagery—an outlet mall, food court and a discount bin of once upon a time but now-forgotten torrid paperback dreams.

Walter Robinson, Bride With a Gun, 2024. Photography by Genevive Hanson

The gallery is large, with more than enough space to wander and wonder: why are we drawn to these things? The donut and the cheeseburger, the bottle of Budweiser, the stuffed toy bunny or the nurses—it’s dreamland and fantasyland, it’s where we are and who we are—a world where we consume and a world of the left-behind—it’s the stuff we can’t do without but somehow take for granted, set aside, or forget. Robinson’s paintings offer up a picture of life—how we live and continue to live whether in the fast lane, the slow lane or the middle lane. There’s comfort here, familiarity and appreciation without question. Look at everything, take pause and stare for a moment, whether it’s the painting that takes you back, makes you smile or laugh or you just shake your head and ask why or, better yet, why not.   

These paintings are smart and I can hear Robinson asking me what I mean by that. Somewhere out there, he knows the answer—and you’ll know the answer the moment you step inside Jeffrey Deitch Gallery and Let The Music Play.

Walter Robinson (1950–2025)

Let The Music Play

May 2 through June 6, 2026

Jeffrey Deitch, 18 Wooster Street

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Feature Image: Winnebago, 2021, and Untitled, 2018, by Walter Robinson. Photography by Genevive Hanson. Courtesy of The Estate of Walter Robinson and Jeffrey Deitch, New York and Los Angeles.

Richard Boch is the author of The Mudd Club Book and a regular contributor to Stories and his column Take A Walk.