In Search of Bel Esprit
Mindy Solomon is pleased to present the work of Heather Rubinstein in our first office space solo exhibition. Loaded with lush and vibrant imagery, the interior becomes a repository for a blooming summer garden.
“This exhibition is inspired by the novel A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. In one particular chapter, Hemingway discusses his time in Paris as a young writer, as well as his collaboration with Ezra Pound to raise money to ‘free’ friend and fellow poet TS Eliot from his boring bank job. Ultimately Eliot goes to live in the garden of The Bel Esprit, located in central Paris, owned by a wealthy American.
My cut flower field, orchard and tree farm—which continues to expand every year—is essentially my Bel Esprit.
Around 2022, after working for a decade with non-traditional materials, I returned to painting with oils on stretched canvas. While my earlier ‘Sewn’ and ‘Recto Verso’ paintings on recycled and mostly unstretched fabrics were concerned with patterning and landscapes seen from above, the more recent paintings seek a more intimate and chaotic relationship to the natural world. Inspired by the memory of place rather than landscape per se (more ‘inscapes’ than ‘landscapes’), and also by precursors like Joan Mitchell, Cy Twombly, Per Kirkeby, Norman Bluhm and Charles Burchfield, these paintings allow me to marry gesture and drawing, giving equal weight to both. The kind of painting I want is one of maximum variousness, emotional charge and spatial complexity, while remaining beautifully orchestrated.”
Each painting drips with juicy wet brush marks, their fluid gesture creating a sense of deep saturated space. Layer upon layer, a network of marks dancing in front to the viewer. There is a fresh inventiveness to Rubinstein’s work and we are excited to bring this comprehensive view to our intimate office space.
About Heather Rubinstein
Heather Bause Rubinstein, born 1975 Englewood, New Jersey, lives and works in New York. Since earning her MFA in Painting at the University of Houston in 2016, Rubinstein has been actively exhibiting, including solo shows at Barbara Davis Gallery, Houston (2024), McClain Gallery, Houston (2019) and group exhibitions at Michael David Gallery, New York (2024, 2020), Marlborough Gallery, New York (2023), Below Grand, New York (2023), White Box, New York (2023), Moravian University (2021), the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece (2018), and the 17th International Triennial of Tapestry,at the Central Museum of Textiles in Lodz, Poland (2022-2023).
In 2021, she created an immersive installation titled “The Clockwork: Daily Painting” in a storefront of the historic art déco AT&T building at 60 Hudson Street in Tribeca. She has co-curated exhibitions at Pierogi Gallery (“Under Erasure” 2019), Marlborough Gallery (“Schema: World as Diagram,” 2023). In 2021, her work was featured in the book The Strangeness of Beauty co-published by Parasol Unit in London and Mousse Publishing.
