Adrianne Rubenstein

BARK OF THE TOWN

May 22 - July 2, 2021

CHECKLIST AVAILABLE HERE

The Pit is pleased to present BARK OF THE TOWN, the gallery’s third solo exhibition by New York-based Adrianne Rubenstein.  On view from May 22 – July 3 2021, with a socially-distanced public reception from 2-5pm on Saturday May 22nd, this exhibition consists of ten new oil paintings that envision and manifest new life through colorful motifs and archetypes that Adrianne has been cultivating for decades. 

Developed together as a suite during Covid-lockdown, the paintings evoke family through compositions, colors, and natural subject matter imagining vitality and freedom — fruits and vegetables; flowers and plants; winged insects and sailboats. Even stationary elements are lusciously free range — a pond’s wobbly reflective surface becomes a witch’s cauldron of fecund primordial soup; fertility is subliminally injected into a desk lamp resembling a sperm; lucky lottery cherries erotically drip and thrust outwards from a befuddled-looking mug. 

Compositional bustle lends breezy paradox to the behind-the-scenes reality of learning how to stay put on pandemic break from Rubenstein’s peripatetic prior daily life as gallery director and curator. Made with “quick moves,” as the artist says, these paintings are “overworked and beaten down, changeable, but still simple and straightforward.” The “gritty, brushy, underpaintings” shine through to show how “paintings get better the more one gives to them, gain intelligence as they get more haptic, develop a consciousness.” 

A fascinating ironic tension between nostalgic kitsch and pure painterly vision underpins Rubenstein’s loving tributes to anti-canonical modes, movements, and styles originally deemed less aesthetically refined, lowly, and non-academic: craft, women’s art, retro 1980s graphics. Referencing is welcomed and evidenced, as Rubenstein’s oeuvre cultivates an aesthetics of simulacra — her primary color palette may imply Impressionist museum posters and vintage Ikea stuff, while her pictorialism is inspired by Kamala Harris’ t-shirt; a dying plant; an embroidered picture of a bedroom hanging on the wall. Imitation is celebrated as Rubenstein weighs young definitions of the “good artist” who copies accurately, against dubious patriarchal pedagogies of individualism and originality. These paintings recall the ways children often first access art: on a dentist’s office waiting room wall or in library books that flatten, shrink, and replicate. “It’s charming how bad a painter I am after art school,” the artist says. “It was like my training was deflected, I refused to learn… I’m painting inner-things that can’t be accurately drawn.”

All that said, the painterly quality here is Romantically visionary, not Pop replica. Rubenstein’s paintings echo feeling and memory, call for repeat studies of subject matter. Sugarloaf Pond is part of a recurring series depicting a fond childhood setting where the artist collected frogs and studied bees. Broccoli Bonsai’s yellows and “padded” texturing recalls a comfy family couch. Even when grim memories emerge, however, the artists says that the imaging “always inverts back to happy.” A good sign for her psyche and a nice gift — distilled pleasure, like a love potion, sifted and refined into mini-monuments about revelry.

Inquiries please email info@the-pit.la