Adrianne Rubenstein
Auras

From May 22 to July 5, 2025

Galerie Nicolas Robert, Montreal, is pleased to present Auras, Adrianne Rubenstein’s most recent body of work. These new paintings continue her practice of buoyantly riffing on the last two centuries of painting, but also are prompted by home decoration images from the 80’s and 90’s. These unusual influences range from maxed-out Laura Ashley-style patterns to minimal New York lofts with white sheets draped over furniture, with many works exploring how we “costume” space. Mixing up motifs for paintings (the goldfish, flower, vase, table, fruit, window) that then function like punctuation, or theatrical versions of themselves, their forms and palette contributing, not determining the painting. 

Exuberantly chromatic, many of the works are a multilevel translation of the tradition of 'paintings within paintings’ (à la Matisse and Bonnard representations of works in the painted studio), adding her own third translation of these referential images through her studio experimentation. Rubenstein allows the referred shapes to transform while painting wet on wet, moving them from representational idea through quick gestural versions, into simplified coloured shapes, pushing past their referent and contributing, but not determining, the painting itself.

Also of influence here is artist Mollie Katzen, more well known as a vegetarian cookbook author (ie. Enchanted Broccoli Forest, Moosewood Cookbook), whose artwork is simultaneously scientific, editorial, an instruction manual, and as paintings, gestural. This multivalent approach, an attempt at a sort of functional freedom for painterly devices, can be seen where the swan, the butterfly and the giant flower are more dreamy, unbounded and escapist.  Riotous conflagrations of flora and fauna, symbols of history and recent past, miraculously exist simultaneously only to fall away within the whole and the specificities of paint. 

In Auras, Adrienne Rubenstein manages to articulate, through glowing pigment, not the specificity of nostalgia, history or home, but rather proposes a convincing experience for the continued potential and practice of painting to articulate life’s ineffable tones.

Adrianne Rubenstein (b. Montreal, 1983; lives/works in New York) holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (2011) and a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design (2007). Solo exhibitions include Magic Show at Broadway Gallery, New York; Blue at Tanya Leighton, Los Angeles; Little Shop of Horrors at Tif Sigfrids, Athens, GA; and Ruby in the Dust at Deli Gallery, New York. Rubenstein has curated exhibitions including Celestial Songs at Venus, New York; Geranium at Stems Gallery, Brussels; and Go Away Road at Loyal Gallery in Stockholm. Her work has been covered in Artforum and The New York Times.