YADID RUBIN – Plowed Furrows
Curator: Nira Itzhaki
Chelouche Gallery presents a comprehensive solo exhibition of Yadid Rubin’s large-scale works that haven’t been shown since his retrospective exhibition ‘Plowed Color’, at the Tel Aviv Museum (2010), to commemorate the 13th anniversary of his death.
The Artist Yadid Rubin is considered one of the most established artists in Israel; his paintings express the beautiful “Israeliness” of the kibbutz landscapes, tractors in vast plowed fields, citrus groves, and cypress boulevards. Disappearing landscapes continue to exist in his paintings, free from visible dependencies; Rubin painted in a studio that had no windows.
The exhibition includes paintings from the late 1980s until the day of his death, as a crystallized unit: landscape scenes from his life, including field, house, tree, path, horizon line and sun in countless compositions and painterly inventions.
Rubin has no precedent in our places. In the book published on Rubin’s retrospective exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum in 2010, Galia Bar-Or described him as “the last Israeli painter.”
Rubin gives free rein to unparalleled color in Israeli art, and delights in the decorative. Rubin painted in his windowless studio by sitting on the floor or standing in front of the canvas leaning against the back of a chair. He applied paint to his works with his hands, a spatula, brushes, or straight from the tube. His style is intense and packed with rich and spectacular colors.
Robin’s sensual painting is spectacular and rich in pictorial inventions. The colorful patterns create an organized whole: the fields of form and colors consist of a repeated sequence of dashes, lines, dots, and circles, which balance the horizontal and vertical rhythms into a whole harmonious and rhythmic structure and create an intense element of abundance and vitality, which seem to seek to the boundaries of the fabric. Color has so much freedom in his work that it emerges from the painting as an object with body and volume.
“I paint the landscapes of the kibbutz, but they are the landscapes of the soul. I don’t paint with direct observation, but from the accumulation of feelings for situations in the landscape, from the feeling that I am in a system that is not accidental,” said Rubin. Nira Itzhaki, who worked with Yadid Rubin throughout his artistic career and curated this exhibition, points to the fact that Rubin was an artist who painted the same thing all his life in an obsessive and Sisyphean way. The exhibition features approximately 60 works from the 1960s to the 2000s, including key works that were landmarks in the artist’s artistic language and which are now being shown for the first time.
Yadid Rubin won the prestigious Minister of Education and Culture award in 2005, and his works were exhibited that year at the Tel Aviv Museum. In 2010 he presented a solo retrospective exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.