Yadid Rubin is one of Israel’s most prominent artists. His new exhibition features 16 new paintings, oil on canvas, from the last two years.
Yadid Rubin, born 1938, lives and works in Kibutz Givat Haim Yichud. Rubin’s paintings express remarkably and beautifully the meaning of the allusive
Term “Israeli characteristics”: the landscape of the kibutz, vast plowed fields, plantations filled with fruitful trees, columns of cypresses, houses and tractors. Small buildings and open spaces long gone live on in his paintings. Yet, Rubin paints in his closed, window-less studio.
“I paint the landscape of the kibutz, but in fact these are the landscapes of the soul. I don’t paint out of plain observation, but out of the accumulation of sensations and reactions to different conditions of nature”, says Rubin.
In this exhibition Yadid Rubin continues his pictorial style, influenced by Van Gogh. Rubin creates thick layers of paint and shapes constructed by brush strokes that appear to be thrown on the canvas with restrained force.
Rubin paints sitting on the floor or standing across from a canvas that leans on a chair. He smears the paint with his bare hands, with a spatula, with brushes or straight from the tube. His style is intense and dense with lush brilliant colorfulness. The colorful patterns repeat themselves to create an organized totality. The fields of form and color are constructed by a repeating rhythm of lines, dots and circles. This rhythm balances the continuance of vertical and horizontal pulses into a harmonic structure creating a strong sensation of vitality and abundance, which seem to want to break the limits of the canvas.
Yadid Rubin won the prestigious Ministry of Culture, Education and Sports Award for 2005, and his works were exhibited in the Tel Aviv Museum.
A solo exhibition of Rubin’s work is planned for 2007 in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
