Gideon Rubin’s paintings are peopled with figures culled from our shared cultural memory; lifted from film stills and vintage magazines, flea markets and second- hand books, Rubin depicts fragmentary glimpses of figures both deeply familiar and intrinsically unknowable. Demonstrating a remarkable command of chromatics and evident love for the materiality of paint itself, the faces of Rubin’s distinctive solitary figures are intentionally blurred, or shielded from the viewer. Anonymity slips into intimacy through an evocation of someone the viewer might know. At once timeless yet speaking to the relentlessness of time - the ways in which it morphs and repeats itself, the way the past seeps into the present - Rubin’s canvases revel in the challenge and possibility of the unfinished.
Rubin holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and a MFA from the Slade School of Art, London. He was the recipient of the ‘Shifting Foundation’ grant in 2014, and his work has been presented in numerous international solo and group exhibitions. Rubin’s work is held by important collections across the UK, France, Italy, The Netherlands, and Israel. Born in Tel Aviv, Rubin lives and works in London.
