page_title: Robin Tewes
section_title: Rooms Without People works
hierarchical_section_title: Robin Tewes / Work / Rooms Without People works
caption_attribution_description: English: Painting by artist Robin Tewes, I'm Not Home Please Leave a Message, oil on birch panel, 24” x 32,” 1999.
context_page_description: Robin Tewes is a Queens-born, New York City-based artist, known since the early 1980s for her representational paintings of frozen, narrative-like moments. 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, among many. Her work has been widely discussed in publications including Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, Tema Celeste, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, 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 and Painting Award, an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award, and inclusion in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in 2016.
  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.
context_section_description: 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 Barbara Pollack described them as "pretty as bonbons, potent as cherry bombs" and the New York Times Roberta Smith noted their sense of color and detail. Nonetheless, critics observed that these intimately scaled, frozen moments also conveyed a stifling hermeticism in which "domesticity becomes terrifying." 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. The Village Voice described the effect as one of the décor erupting "in silent but virulent outbursts and erotic daydreams." 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; 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 emotions 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.
caption: Robin Tewes, I'm Not Home Please Leave a Message, oil on birch panel, 24" x 32," 1999.
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