Nancy Rubins - Skins, Structures, Landmasses

We all have some history with boats, whether our grandparents came over that way or whether we used them as kids. The canoe, for example, is such a simple form, an ancient form. And it's 100 percent figurative, designed around the human figure. --Nancy Rubins

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to announce "Skins, Structures, Landmasses," Nancy Rubins' first exhibition in Los Angeles since 2001. The exhibition will feature new sculptures, assembled on site at the gallery, drawings, and photographic collages.

A pre-eminent American sculptor, Rubins takes used or discarded industrial materials and objects and transforms them into monumental sculptures whose scale and forceful presence have an overwhelming physical impact. Rubins acts as an intermediary between the past and future states of her chosen materials, crafting them into sculptures while maintaining the discrete identities of their constituents. Her work incorporates objects of consumer culture that sometimes retain visible identifying logos, however she is most interested in their formal qualities and spatial potential than their brand. Her arrangements evoke a precarious equilibrium of objects in space, citing both the traditions of modernist American monumental sculpture as well as bricolage, which emphasize the aesthetic possibilities of quotidian objects. Using these diverse precedents as her foundations, she produces sculptures that brim with the entropic energies and forces of nature.

Boats entered Rubins' sculptural vocabulary in 2000, chosen for their lightness, mobility, and dynamic structure. Work for New Space, Stainless Steel, Aluminum, Monochrome I & II are made up of a variety of used aluminum boats including canoes, insta-boats, jon boats, and rowboats. In both sculptures, wire cable connects the boats to each other and to the steel armature, forming a weblike structure of compression and tension that recalls Buckminster Fuller's notion of "tensegrity" where the whole is stronger than the parts. The boats bear traces of their earlier lives, including identification numbers and incidental damage thus the seemingly monochromatic sculptures reveal a rich patination on closer examination. In a nod to Brancusi that conflates Bird in Space with Endless Column, they rise away from the floor, cantilevering toward each other in mid-flight.

Using the highly idiosyncratic method that she invented thirty years ago, Rubins pushes the limits of what pencil on paper can achieve in terms of strength and delicacy, stasis and dynamism. Working on the floor, she covers the paper with rich layers of graphite until she has made completely opaque fields of gunmetal-gray, animated by the gestural marks of the hand rapidly moving across the paper. She achieves even greater depth in her surfaces by tearing the paper and gluing different sections together to create overlapping forms that incorporate techniques from both collage and sculpture. The densely worked graphite drawings read as leaden reliefs even though they are in fact physically light, unframed works on paper. Their abstract planes engage with the walls, projecting outward. Although they are simple and direct in terms of materials, being so heavily worked they are complex in terms of process, palpable accumulations of the time and energy required to produce them. Consequently Rubins describes these drawings as "batteries" or containers storing energy.

Consistent with her primary concern to energize space through sculptural intervention, Rubins has used photographs of boats in the inventory from which she makes her sculptures to make detailed collages on paper. With their intricately clustered motifs thrusting outwards in all directions, these organic images also appear to emanate from a sort of centrifugal force.

Nancy Rubins was born in Naples, Texas, raised in Tullahoma, Tennessee, and studied at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, Baltimore (BFA, 1974) and the University of California, Davis (MFA, 1976). Her work is included in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; and FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon, France. Major exhibitions include "Airplane Parts and Building, A Large Growth for San Diego," Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (1994); ARTPACE, San Antonio (1997); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1995); Miami Art Museum (1999); Fonds regional d'art contemporain de Bourgogne, France (2005); "MoMA and Airplane Parts," SculptureCenter, Long Island City, New York (2006); and "Big Pleasure Point," Lincoln Center, New York (2006).

Nancy Rubins lives and works in Topanga Canyon, California.

Nancy Rubins
Skins, Structures, Landmasses

Ort:
North gallery: 03.06.2010 - 09.07.2010
South gallery: 03.06.2010 - 03.09.2010