Leo Rubinfien “The City Beside You, The City Inside You”

Steven Kasher Gallery

poster for Leo Rubinfien “The City Beside You, The City Inside You”

This event has ended.

Steven Kasher Gallery presents Leo Rubinfien: The City Beside You, The City Inside You. The exhibition consists of 23 large-scale black and white photographs of New York and its people, and evokes the experience of moving through the city with great intimacy and subtlety. This is Rubinfien’s first show of new images since his acclaimed work curating Garry Winogrand’s retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Jeu de Paume. That exhibition made many lists of the best museum shows of 2014.

Rubinfien is known for his photographs from all over the world, especially East Asia, where he spent much of his childhood, and for his work on the landscape of globalization. In this new exhibition, the quintessential expat comes home. Seeing New York again after years of traveling, Rubinfien notes how the city “is characterized by the sense of promise it holds out to the thousands of people who come to make their way here, by its harshness, its mixed sense of brightness and disappointment, by how it places itself within us yet always remains unknowable.”

Rubinfien has published on New York once before, in his short book The Ardbeg (Taka Ishii Gallery, 2010), a brief, lyrical evocation of the city through the eyes of an outsider. In that piece, Rubinfien’s longtime friend and colleague Akiyoshi Taniguchi recalled the New York of his youth: “This is my memory — when I was in New York. Always hungry. Always has a kind of sharpness. Very rough. I relate to New York darkness…. Something like the smell of the cigar, also the smell of garbage, the weekend night in Manhattan, you can smell woman’s perfume. Those smells are of human body, human things.”

Rubinfien’s work has been admired for many years for its visual richness, its sensitivity to human character, its technical perfection, the depth of feeling it brings to mundane subjects and the complex meanings it finds there. Many writers and viewers have commented on its unashamed yet unsentimental humanism.

Media

Schedule

from September 17, 2015 to October 24, 2015

Opening Reception on 2015-09-17 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Leo Rubinfien

  • Facebook

    Reviews

    All content on this site is © their respective owner(s).
    New York Art Beat (2008) - About - Contact - Privacy - Terms of Use