We are delighted to announce the second solo exhibition by Gideon Rubin at our gallery in Milan. We will show new works including a series of 13 paintings inspired by the erotic and poetic female portraits taken in the 1960s by Carlo Mollino (1905 -1973), the genius Italian architect and designer from Turin who designed the Teatro Regio in his native city with a corset-shaped floor plan.
In these works, as in his landscapes or famous solitary figures, Rubin surprises us with the ability to sublimate his subjects to their essence. Even if the facial features are invisible and the surroundings are only hinted at, there is a striking and immediate understanding of the situation and the mood, by how an attitude, a hairstyle or the detail of a dress can reveal an atmosphere, an identity, an intimacy.
Starting mostly from found images, photographs that belong to a personal but anonymous past, or images from the web and newspapers, Rubin collects and creates an iconographic archive for his paintings, a sort of act of reappropriation of memories, personal stories, and figurations.
His subjects - women and men - evoke a reflection on the relationship between oneself and others, between the individual and the collective. Delicate colors - sandy tones, grayish blues, milky whites – are emphasized by fluid brushstrokes that bring back to life and give permanence to an almost forgotten and suspended moment. Light reflects and plays on the subjects: as we look at his figures, we are captured by a visual pleasure that invites us to contemplate and complete the missing parts with our own imagination.
For the series inspired by Mollino's Polaroids that give the exhibition its title, Rubin recalls how those "exquisite images continued to haunt my thoughts even after I returned to my studio in London. The 13 paintings focus on the women featured in the photographs and some men I imagined."
In a separate series a single subject - a woman's head seen from behind with a long braid in the foreground - is expanded and magnified across four canvases of increasing size. Here Rubin evokes new interpretations of a broader and more complex shared history, however with multiple implications and an intimate character and sensibility in which to mirror oneself.
Gideon Rubin was born in Tel Aviv in 1973; he is the grandson of Romanian born Reuven Rubin, one of the pioneers of Israeli art. Gideon studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York and then at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London, where he completed his studies in 2002 and where he currently lives. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions around the world, most recently in Sydney, Auckland, Tokyo, and Paris. His works are included in international museums and important private collections, among others the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts in San Francisco; The Zabludowicz Collection in London; Ruinart and Fondation Francès in France; Museum Voorlinden Collection in the Netherlands; Herzliya Museum for Contemporary Art and Rubin Museum in Israel; Collezione Maramotti and the Collezione Fondazione San Patrignano in Italy.
