GIDEON RUBIN: SUBSTANCE TO SHADOWS

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Substance to Shadows, an exhibition of new paintings by London-based Israeli artist Gideon Rubin. This is Rubin’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. An opening reception will take place at 6150 Wilshire Blvd, Saturday, October 28 from 5 – 7pm.

Gideon Rubin paints in a concentrated, dense, and restrained figurative mode. His practice is the product of private calculations: how few gestures might suggest, rather than describe a situation, a figure, or a landscape. Conceptually he is concerned with reduction and constraint. His controlled and subtle palette is suggestive of his source materials: vintage photos, film stills, and magazine clippings, yet narratively he leaves plenty of room for viewers to wander.

For Rubin, film and photography are closely linked to memory and history—capturing a single moment in time, be it significant or personal. Although stripped of their original contexts, the paintings in Substance to Shadows draw primarily from Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (1975), Eric Rohmer’s A Summer’s Tale 1996, and the Cuban film Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. The specifics of the characters and scenes he considers via his paintings are left open-ended and ambiguous. Instead, he hints at story through atmosphere and mood, constructed from painterly explorations of light, shade, composition, and color, resulting in paintings that retain the drama and mystery of cinema.

Annulled from space, exonerated from time, Rubin breathes a new freedom into his scenes wherein a certain distance and anonymity multiplies their effectiveness. Like snapshots, these collected fragments leave behind the trace of life through which the artist muses on themes of adolescence, young love, or a first kiss. The underlying elusive structure of his pictures is a potent intimacy, offering a site to contemplate memory, history, and identity.