Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce _Substance to Shadow_s, 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.

Gideon Rubin (b. 1973, Tel Aviv, Israel) received his MFA from Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London and his BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY. His work has been the subject of important solo and group exhibitions at K11 Art Museum, Shanghai, China; Rubin Museum, Tel Aviv, Israel; the Freud Museum, London, UK; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chengdu, Chengdu, China; San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, CA; and Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Herzliya, Israel, among others. Rubin's work is represented in prominent public collections worldwide including Collezione Fondazione San Patrignano, Italy; Fondation Frances, France; Herzliya Museum for Contemporary Art, Israel; McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, CA; Museum Voorlinden Collection, Netherlands; Rubin Museum, Israel; Ruinart Collection, France; The Seavest Collection, NY; Sender Collection, Germany; the Speyer Family Collection, NY; and the Zabludowicz Collection, UK, among others. Rubin lives and works in London, UK.

Press release courtesy Anat Ebgi.