Gideon Rubin, Measured Distance

About

Gideon Rubin's third solo exhibition at ROKEBY includes a series of some of the artists largest scale paintings to date. The source of the new paintings are old yearbooks; commemorative annuals that have been abandoned by their owners and collected and amassed by the artist. Black and white images of strangers from the mid-Twentieth Century are translated onto canvases and embedded within the materiality of paint. Within the new paintings Rubin's now recognizably refined palette of subdued ochre's, greys and blues offer the figures a sense of shared cadence and time. Placed within increasingly abstracted, empty and ambiguous landscapes, and painted with apparently effortless and unhesitatingly bold brushstrokes, each character draws the attention of the viewers eye as much as their imagination.