Gideon Rubin show is like a haunted house of images real and imagined.
By Max Blue, Special to “The Examiner • February 4, 2022
The Gideon Rubin show at Hosfelt Gallery feels a bit like a haunted house. “Red Boys and Green Girls” is the London-based painter’s seventh solo show with the gallery, serving up a recent selection of the painter’s now standard fare: minimalist, oil-on-linen figurative works with faceless characters. There’s an unsettling aspect to these blank countenances, but it draws more than it repels.
Rubin’s transition away from realist painting was inspired by the discovery of a collection of Victorian photo albums at a bookshop in Hampstead in 2006. Funny, since photographs are usually equated with realism. But it was the gaps in Rubin’s own personal history — an absence of photographic records predating his extended family’s emigration from Poland to Israel in the 1930s — that inspired him. He began painting from old photographs, and sometimes on top of them, leaving the faces blank both to homage lost records and to leave room for viewers to insert their own narratives.
The source material for Rubin’s more recent pictures comes from many places, but it’s always photographic. For this show, Rubin draws on internet images, vintage magazines and film stills. As Gabriel Coxhead points out in his essay “Blurred Visions,” “In Rubin’s paintings, photography itself is the subject,” rather than the people those photographs depict. Either way, what Rubin’s really playing with is memory.
Gideon Rubin, “Red Boys and Green Girls” Solo Show at Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco, 27 January - 19 February 2022
Gideon Rubin’, “Green Dress,” 2021
