Past exhibitions

Broadway is pleased to announce Magic Show our second solo exhibition with New York painter Adrianne Rubenstein. The show will be on view February 8 - March 16 with an opening reception Thursday, February 8th 6-8pm.

They sway and bob on the surface like so many bath toys, capsizing in the eddies: Goldfish (à la Matisse, indicated by the sparest of outlines, segments of orange, or oblong blips round at the head and not at the tail). Lily pads (shorthanded as a circle missing a triangular notch that also reads as Pac-Man, a kind of patron saint here of appetite and rampant desire). Waterlilies, that are also tulips (and upside-down ghosts, again, à la Pac-Man). Other kinds of flowers (either shaped like breasts and areola with amoeboid or softly scalloped circles buttoned in the center, or like straggly palm trees or spooky witch hands bent with pointy fingers for petals). Vases, pitchers, vessels. Chairs. Hints of a window (suggesting interiors). A pair of bees (wasp-like, tonguing two flowers). Strawberries (dangling on the vine, like charms on a bracelet) and a cluster of grapes. Broccoli, so much broccoli (sometimes doubling as trees). And fragments of a fairytale landscape. Scaled haphazardly, these pictograms resist cohering into representational scenes. Rather, their adjacencies make up a fluid psychic map of attention paid and emotion invested.

Adrianne Rubenstein’s embrace of small, silly, antiheroic things—metonyms of a quiet life of observation and daydream, a home life, redolent with childhood associations—may give an initial impression of one-dimensionality, like stickers on a folder or backseat window. They are starting points, ways in. So many excuses to paint: “I try to work with simplified subjects so the painting can just be painting.” While they can be extremely graphic, the shapes she uses and reuses are fundamentally in service of and subsumed by wild conflagrations of color and unblended strokes that make her paintings radiate outsized life force and ineffable glow.

In “Magic Show,” Rubenstein is at least as interested in dissolving things as in appearing them. Things have the quality of apparitions and afterimages, as though fleetingly formed out of cloud, shadow, or hot neural firings. And yet, her handling of paint is visceral, material, and creamed. Building up surfaces with scrubby swaths, loose lines, and intense patches, she makes mark-making the main generator of shape, competing right alongside imagery. A raw energy runs through all things. Color and stroke have a touch and go relationship with what she depicts, in the manner of the Fauves or Emil Nolde. Our eye (her brush) bounces from spot to spot, tracking accents of one lush hue or another across positive and negative space. Heavily outlined objects rupture just short of completion: more than things themselves, she portrays the condition of being uncontainable, where inner juices burst forth and the surrounding atmosphere rushes in. Across each painting lingers an air of great release.

Speaking of atmospheres, Rubenstein’s are typically tinted purple and blue. In fact, blue, especially when deep and dark, has become an aesthetic anchor (her 2023 solo show in LA, after all, was titled “Blue”) and a gathering of blues signals the sublime in her work—something very beautiful, breathtaking, or swoon-inducing, something knee-bucklingly lovely. Aqua and sky-blue mostly cover a warm, coral pink underpainting that emanates vivid sunset tones in Several Gardens. Daubs of periwinkle and teal steal the show in Magic Show. And Blue Broccoli wrangles countless shades and tints to conjure from its abstract watery depths an evocation of Monet’s indescribably divine Nympheas, while also being churned by the lyrical goof of her chosen subject matters and the crayon-fisted way she shapes them. For Rubenstein, color is anything but flat; it is a chorus of varying pitches and modulated opacities (she wields white masterfully), a heightened manifestation of intuitive, irrepressible, wet-on-wet movement that can be spastic or casual or considered and is recorded right there for all to see as painting.

~ Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer

Devin Troy Stother

The Black Man Inside

September 8 - September 30, 2023

I love being called a black person. The color of my skin is nowhere near what the actual pantone looks like. I’ve just always loved the idea that my identity is tied and associated with a color, and it happens to be one of my favorite colors to work with. Also, being a visual artist, I think it’s clear why I would love being marginalized down to a color. A color that has a culturally established notions, ideas, and vibes attached to it. The very definition of the word black has a whole legacy on its own:

1. Black is a color that results from the absence or complete absorption of visible light. It is an achromatic color, without hue, like white and grey. It is often used symbolically or figuratively to represent darkness.

2. Black, or less commonly, black

a: of or relating to any of various population groups of especially African ancestry often considered as having dark pigmentation of the skin, but in fact having a wide range of skin colors.

Black Americans

NOTE: Capitalization of Black in this use is now widely established.

b: of or relating to Black people and often especially to African American people or their culture.

Black literature.

3. Black was one of the first colors used by artists in Neolithic cave paintings. It was used in ancient Egypt and Greece as the color of the underworld. In the Roman Empire it became the color of mourning, and over the centuries it was frequently associated with death, evil, witches, and magic.

Black is the most common ink color used for printing books, newspapers and documents, as it provides the highest contrast with white paper and thus is the easiest color to read. Similarly, black text on a white screen is the most common format used on computer screens.

Some pretty, pretty fucking cool facts in my opinion.

The works in the show are all basically forms of self-portraits. These self-portraits are told through the guise of the studio, with the studio being a reflection of myself. This is also achieved by putting myself into a painting that exists somewhere inside of the still-life-like interiors, that mimic and mirror my own studio set up. So, I am formally and metaphorically inside all of the images. While my essence and some of my body parts inhabit the pictorial space, the idea of the portrait is subverted by objects and ephemera that populate my life as a painter. The objects start to become motifs that move from painting to painting, leaving a trail of my presence in them all.

The title is also a reference to my physical and meta self and how I delegate myself to be inside the studio and the gallery itself, while also referring to the idea that I’m in my own head.

While being in my own head, I begin to constantly think about the landscape and trajectory of “black” contemporary painting and its relationship with portraiture, how that relationship has been formed and molded by a mainly non-black audience. The idea of just putting up a mirror in the studio and using what you see in the mirror's reflection as the sole content for your current works.

This journey for me has been a fascinating introspective look to all things that I hold sacred when thinking of what marks, colors, and forms best describe the self in the metaphoric and the literal sense—then trying to find the best way to redirect all that shit onto a fucking canvas.

--Devin Troy Strother

Los Angeles, August 2023

Exhibitions

Jessie Henson

In the Project Room: Niki Ford

Teresa Baker

In the Project Room: Abbey Williams

Claire Oswalt: Draw me a Clock

Sky Hopinka: Unforgiven Souls Sing Hymns

In the Project Room: Josh Tonsfeldt: Five Below

Mickey Lee: Big Rock Candy Mountain

Martha Friedman: Divided Subject

Rob Davis

Jacques Louis Vidal

John Riepenhoff

Mari Eastman

Adrianne Rubenstein

Friends of the Pod

Andrew Kuo

Sarah Cain

Devin Troy Strother

Yoshiaki Mochizuki

JP Munro

Jessie Henson

Claire Oswalt

James Benjamin Franklin

Ariel Mitchell

Davina Semo

Jo Nigoghossian

Lars Fisk

Meg Lipke

Devin Troy Strother

Victoria Roth

Jamilah Sabur

John Riepenhoff

Sky Hopinka

Jo Nigoghossian

Josh Tonsfeldt

Jon Pestoni

Edie Fake

Adrianne Rubenstein

Sarah Cain

Tom Lawson

Soft Network

Claire Oswalt

Devin Troy Strother

Andrew Kuo

Andrea Marie Breiling

Andrew Kuo, Edie Fake, Devin Troy Strother, Claire Oswalt, Jo Nigoghossian, Lars Fisk, Sarah Cain, Josh Tonsfeldt

Meg Lipke

Sky Hopinka