Artist:
A retrospective featuring the decade-long collaboration between painter Tim Sharman and sculptor Walter Robinson

Studio Quercus is pleased to present an exhibit devoted to the art of Tag Team, the creative alliance of painter Tim Sharman and sculptor Walter Robinson. In 1996, these two artists, each highly accomplished and recognized in his own right, embarked on a fruitful, decade-long collaboration, which yielded some 300 drawings and an assortment of large-scale mixed media works, sculptures, and installations. The Studio Quercus retrospective will attempt to grasp the entire scope of Tag Team’s prolific output.
 
The work is breathtaking in its prodigious stylistic reach, hair-raising in its twists and flights, and unfathomable in its volume. Additional words and phrases that may be of use to anyone attempting to describe the art of Tag Team are: phantasmagoric, intoxicating, mind-blowing, stunning, spine-tingling, puzzling, hilarious, shocking, and beautiful. The work delightfully exploits the artists’ craft while trawling the depths of their imagination. The needle on the Sensibil-o-meter wags freely from high art to juvenile extravagance.
                                                                                                 
Sharman and Robinson met in the summer of 1996 at a San Francisco gallery exhibition of Sharman's paintings. They became friends and soon began their collaborative mixed media drawings, which they sent back and forth through the mail in a variation on the Surrealists' writing game cadavre exquis. Later, the Sharman-Robinson collaboration came to involve public drawing/performances, in which they worked simultaneously on portraits with live sitters.

From the very beginning, these collaborations reflected an intense and symbiotic meeting of minds wherein a third ego materialized. An artistic game theory, comprised of methods and give-and-take interaction, drove each piece into the realm of unpremeditated, unconscious art that can be deeply moving, disturbing, and highly entertaining.

As their joint efforts accumulated and began to exhibit in galleries, Sharman and Robinson assumed the nom de guerre Tag Team. The name was a nod to their shared appreciation for the professional wrestling convention in which one member of a team tags his partner to bring him into the ring.

Walter Robinson is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, and Galerie Zidoun, Luxembourg. His work is in private and public collections in the U.S. and Europe. Tim Sharman is an artist and educator; he teaches at the California College of the Arts and continues making art, notably his ongoing project, The Doof Museum of Culture and History. He has been in numerous exhibitions throughout California and the United States.