BENJAMIN RUBLOFF

b. 1975, New York, Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

2011 – Cornell University, M.F.A.

2002 – Harvard University, M.A.

1998 – Wesleyan University, B.A. American Studies

In my paintings, I seek to empty out images—to strip them of content, context, and specificity—in order explore their performative behaviors. The experience of an image hinges on aspects of its address, its vernacular, and the way that it structures spectatorship. I work with the assumption that the image is a vessel of expectation.

Painting serves as a way of grappling with the particular behaviors of images. The precision in the paintings is an attempt to undermine both mark and gesture, to turn on the index of the painterly and make the resulting pictures reticent, opaque refusals.

No ideas, but in things

Subjects vary, but all approach contemporary social and political concerns, through the vernacular of the everyday. I have painted the emptied out clothing of suspected insurgents captured in Iraq; the windowless and detail-less McMansion developments in the new American West; the revolutionary paintings of Malevich in 1915 robbed of their content, with the shadows from their exhibition the only trace of a utopian painting-dream; and overexposed news images that approach blindness.

-Benjamin Rubloff

Solo Exhibitions:

2015 – Victory Over the Sun, Kunstraum Ossastr. Berlin

2014 – Ferne Aussichten, White Square Gallery, Berlin

2013 – Security, White Square Gallery, Berlin

2012 – What Would the Community Think? White Square Gallery, Berlin

2011 – Penumbra, Tjaden Gallery, Cornell University

2010 – Let it Bleed, The Experimental Gallery, Ithaca NY Here we are in the Years, Tjaden Gallery, Cornell University, NY

2008 – Distant Prospects, Krammig & Pepper Contemporary, Berlin

2007 – This is a Wilderness, Krammig & Pepper Contemporary, Berlin.

Group Exhibitions:

2013:  Portas Abertas, Fórum Eugénio de Almeida, Evora, Portugual

2011:  Meditations in an Emergency, DUMBO Art Center, Brooklyn, NY (curated by Christopher Lew) Signs in the Road, CRLab/Winkleman Gallery, NY, NY

2010:  Art Chicago, (presented by Wilde Gallery, Berlin) Chicago, IL

Void, Gallery Robert Drees, Hannover, Germany

(Curated by Christoph Kivelitz)

Anthology of Optimism, MMX, Berlin

2009 – Spirits, Stadtbad Wedding, Berlin MFA Group Show, Cornell University

2008 – El Dorado Auction, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin Depot, Krammig & Pepper Contemporary, Berlin

2006 – Group exhibition: Der Hammer, Chashama Gallery, New York, NY

Press:

A Brush with the Real: Figurative Painting Today, 2014 ed. Margherita Dessanay & Marc Valli, Laurence King Publishing “Space of Engagement”: Elephant Magazine, Winter 2012, Katya Tylevich “Melancholische Wesen” Frankfurter Allgemeine, 11.11.2006 “After the Wall” Financial Times, 23.9.2005