• NEWS

    Zielona Góra | Muzeum Ziemi Lubuskiej - Galeria Nowy Wiek | exhibition: Kortyka – Jeschke. Część wspólna | finissage: October 19. 19 pm

    Russia | Moscow | exhibition: Art-lobster-tart | 6. Moscow International Biennale for Young Art | with the participation of Mateusz Piestrak and Piotr Macha | opens on June 13 at A3 gallery

    Lithuania | Vilnius | ARTVILNIUS’18 | 9th International Contemporary Art Fair | Exhibition and Congress Centre Litexpo | 7 – 10 JUNE 2018

    Berlin | Assembly Gallery Allerstrasse 15 | Piotr Kotlicki | A Lunatic in His Garden | 27-29.04.2018 - during Berlin Gallery Weekend

    Poznań | Assembly Gallery | Benjamin Rubloff | Today | 13.04. — 13.05.2018

    USA | NY 10011 | New York City | 125 W 18TH ST | METROPOLITAN PAVILION | SCOPE Art Show NEW YORK 2018 | Mateusz Piestrak | 8-11.03.2018

    Poznań | Cultural Center ZAMEK | Małgorzata Myślińska | Artist-In-Residence Programme | starts 25.01.2018

    Belgium | Brussels | LE 26 - Galerie Felix Frachon | Piotr Kotlicki | Hotel Europa - Kontynent Des Anecdotes | 11.01. - 11.02. 2018

    Düsseldorf | GATE art zone | Mateusz Piestrak | Modernization | 11.11. 2017 - 1.04.2018

    London | BEERS London | 75 Works on Paper | 16.11. - 23.12.2017
  • Today

    The recent work of Berlin-based artist, Benjamin Rubloff (b.1975; New York) engages with
    the history of abstract painting. In the current show, he quotes two modes of
    abstraction—suprematism and gestural painting— upending them through plays-of- hand
    that challenge our expectations about modernist painting.  Working closely from
    photographic source material, the artist creates meticulous transcriptions of found painting
    „situations”. For his first solo show with Assembly Gallery, he is presenting two projects,
    the installation Victory over the Sun (1915-2015) and recent graffiti-based paintings,
    entitled Ciphers (2018)

    The installation, Victory over the Sun (1915-2015), is a response to Kasimir Malevich’s
    groundbreaking 1915 exhibition, The Last Futurist Exhibition 0.10, in which Malevich
    presented a revolutionary approach to painting that manifested as spiritually-charged
    minimalist composition. In the current installation—which echoes Malevich’s original salon
    hanging—the artist has painted 1:1 scaled depictions of Malevich’s paintings, leaving their
    surfaces blank. With Malevich’s well-known motifs effectively erased, the installation
    creates a void that draws awareness to the paintings' context, framing and objecthood.
    This creates a playful Matroyoshka doll effect, in which the painting-of- a-painting
    illuminates the role that spectacle and staging play for historicized artworks in museum
    settings.

    The recent work, Ciphers, first appear as gestural abstract paintings. Their tightly
    orchestrated affect stems from a dynamic figure-ground interplay in which solid gestural
    marks hover over ephemeral, ghostly grounds. Upon closer look, the paintings reveal that
    they are not gestural paintings but rather the result of a slow, deliberate process of
    copying. In actuality, the paintings are transcriptions of the speedy gestures of graffiti
    taggers. The carefully cropping of these fragments effectively free the paintings from easy
    identification, allowing the works to become conversant with historical languages of
    painterly abstraction.  In this way, the works call attention to painting's fetish for gesture
    and the prevalence of color-field atmospheres that suggest the metaphysical. Though the
    idea of gestural expression is undermined by the fact of the copy, subjectivity is
    reinscribed into each of the works through the addition of artist writings and photographic
    documentations that address the role that these tags, as traces, play as quotidian markers
    in urban life.

    Benjamin Rubloff has shown his works in Europe and the United States. He holds an MFA
    from Cornell University and an MA from Harvard University.  His work has been featured in
    Lawrence King Publisher’s Survey on contemporary figurative painting, A Brush with the
    Real.  He lives and works in Berlin.