Gideon Rubin: The Kaiser's Daughter

Most of the paintings in Gideon Rubin’s sixth solo exhibition with Hosfelt Gallery were selected from work made for an exhibition at the Freud Museum in London. As source material, Rubin — an Israeli living in London whose work always refers to found images — mined photographs illustrating a serialized English-language edition of Mein Kampf that was published in 1939, the same year that Rubin’s grandparents, like Sigmund Freud, fled Europe to escape Nazi persecution.

Rubin’s characteristic manner of painting – with his subjects reduced to a few adept brushstrokes in a minimal color palette — renders his imagery simultaneously straightforward and ambiguous. They read like a flash of memory at the point of fading completely, a dream, or a history known only through re-telling.

Other paintings in this exhibition refer to Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1975 experimental film, The Mirror, a non-linear, autobiographical masterpiece known for the poetry of its cinematography. Central to the work of the three — Freud, Tarkovsky and Rubin — is the slipperiness of human memory and the importance of seeking clues in the past to decipher and resolve the issues of the present.

Gideon Rubin was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, and lives in London. He received his MFA from Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London. His work has been exhibited extensively internationally.