Texts by Gabriel Coxhead, Martin Herbert, Aya Lurie, Sarah Suzuki

Coinciding with a touring exhibition of paintings and works on paper, this book is the first monograph on the acclaimed young Israeli painter Gideon Rubin.

After witnessing the events of 9/11 in New York first hand, Rubin turned his back on his realist way of working and embarked on a method that has become his signature style. Taking found images of strangers in twentieth-century family albums, newspapers, and magazines, he begins a process of visual reduction and obliteration that culminates in an eerie and compelling body of work that is at once enticing and poignant, seductive yet sinister. His small and intimate portraits of faceless figures, full of life but empty of expression, are charming and chilling in equal measure. They unsettle and unnerve, yet feel strangely familiar.

His tiny paintings on cardboard of blank-faced models, actors, pop stars, and politicians – from Che Guevara and Dominique Strauss-Kahn to Amy Winehouse and Cheryl Cole – all reduced to a generic equivalence and interchangeability, comment on the ephemeral nature of the news and the newsworthy and the disposability of our celebrity age.

These are works that evoke the selective and transformative processes of memory, but by drawing on Chinese propaganda pamphlets, celebrity magazines, the society pages of newspapers, as well as art history, they also lay bare the shared shorthands through which personality and desire are projected and read. In the age of Instagram and selfies, they remind us that photography, far from an unmediated and direct reflection of reality, is at its core unstable and subject to manipulation, be it in the interests of politics, commerce or diversion.

This exquisite book features high-quality reproductions of dozens of works and numerous photographs of the artist and the studio. Four international writers examine how Rubin both challenges and extends the traditions of European painted portraiture. They also consider how he employs the ancient and articulate medium of oil paint to stake a claim for the renewed relevance and enduring value of the hand-crafted picture, and to question the relative status of photography as the supposed carrier of ‘truth’.

Gideon Rubin is an Israeli artist based in London. He received his BFA from School of Visual Arts in New York and his MFA from Slade School of Art in London. He has had numerous international solo exhibitions and appeared in many group shows around the world, and his works are included in private collections in London, Hong Kong, New York, Paris and elsewhere. In 2014, he was awarded the Shifting Foundation Grant and spent time at the Da Wang Culture Highland artist residency near Shenzhen, China. In 2013, he undertook the Outset Israel Bialik Residency in Tel Aviv. He is represented by Galerie Karsten Greve Paris, Cologne and St Moritz; Rokeby, London; Hosfelt Gallery, San Franscisco; and Alon Segev Gallery, Tel Aviv.

Gabriel Coxhead is a writer, art critic and curator based in London. He is a regular contributor to Time Out London and has also written for the Guardian, Jewish Quarterly, Financial Times, Art Review and Cabinet magazine, among other publications.

Martin Herbert is a writer and critic based in Tunbridge Wells and Berlin. He is associate editor of Art Review and Modern Painters, and writes regularly for Art Monthly, Artforum and Frieze. He is the author of Mark Wallinger (T&H, 2011).

Aya Lurie is Director and Chief Curator of Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Herzliya, Israel.

Sarah Suzuki is an associate curator in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Please Return

Edited by Gaby Hartel
With texts by Ina Blom, Gaby Hartel, Esther Kinsky, Thomas Macho, Mark Ravenhill and Jonathan Watkins

‘Supremely elegant’ — Apollo

Since the 1990s, acclaimed London-based Norwegian artist A K Dolven has produced a substantial body of work exploring the relationship between individuals and the perception of their environment, the connections that bind inner and outer realities, and the representation of sublime natural forces. Using a diverse range of media, including painting, film, sound and large-scale sculptural installation, she combines seemingly simple, almost minimalistic elements to create complex responses to a particular locale – especially the frozen landscapes of the Arctic Circle in her native Norway – while maintaining a universal voice that resonates far beyond the specifics of the place. Frequently immersive in nature, her works investigate but also induce feelings of discomfort and disorientation in the eye, body and mind of the viewer, an impression of forever being at odds with one’s surroundings as encountered through the various senses.

Coinciding with a solo exhibition at the Ikon Gallery, this compelling book presents the past decade of the artist’s practice. In five themed chapters, each artwork is shown in a series of large-scale installation shots and details that replicate the spatial and physical impact of the piece itself. Texts by five internationally renowned writers and thinkers illuminate various aspects of the artist’s work, addressing, among other things, its political significance, emotional intensity and philosophical depth. An introduction by Gaby Hartel considers the importance of A K Dolven’s sketchbooks to the genesis of her ideas, while an illustrated guide to the works presents the artist’s own detailed description of each one with supporting installation notes and background source material.

A K Dolven is one of Norway’s best-known and most highly acclaimed artists. Since 1997, she has lived and worked between London and Lofoten, Norway, and has exhibited widely across Europe, America and Asia. Her work is in major public and private collections around the world. She was awarded the German Fred-Thieler Prize in 2000 and the Swedish Prince Eugen Medal in 2005. In 2013, she was commissioned by the University of Cambridge to create a permanent public artwork in the city.

Ina Blom is an art critic, curator and art historian based in Oslo, Norway. Since 2001, she has been Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo. She is a member of the editorial boards of Art History, Journal of the Association of Art Historians and Konsthistorisk Tidsskrift, and is a contributor to Artforum, Parkett, Afterall and Texte zur Kunst. 

Gaby Hartel is a cultural journalist, radio broadcaster and literary translator based in Berlin and London. She has published extensively on contemporary art, sound and literature.

Esther Kinsky is an award-winning writer and literary translator living and working in Berlin and 
Battonya, Hungary. Her first novel, Summer Resort, was 
published in English in 2011. In 2014, she was longlisted for Deutscher Buchpreis, for her novel Am Fluss, based on a series of walks along London’s River Lea.

Thomas Macho is a philosopher, curator and professor of cultural theory and history at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institut für Kulturwissenschaft, which he co-founded. He has published widely on music and art, metaphors of death, silence, and representations of contemporary identity. 

Mark Ravenhill is a playwright, actor and journalist. His plays include Shopping and Fucking (1996), Some Explicit Polaroids (1999) and Mother Clap’s Molly House (2001). In 2012, he became the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Writer in Residence, and is Associate Director of London’s Little Opera House at the King’s Head Theatre. He is a regular contributor to the Guardian.

Jonathan Watkins is an internationally renowned curator and writer and the director of Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, United Kingdom. He has curated significant exhibitions in many countries and directed several important biennials and triennials, including those in Venice, Sydney, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Sharjah and London.

Texts by Martin Gayford, Giles Coren, Tim Marlow and Sarah Howgate
With contributions from Damien Hirst, Baz Luhrmann, Ivan Massow, Philip Mould, Michael Parkinson, John Quin, Shebah Ronay Yeo and others

Jonathan Yeo is one of Britain’s best-known portrait painters. Over more than a decade, he has gained an international reputation for painting some of the most famous faces of our age. Models and movie stars, artists and actors, politicians and princes – all have been the subject of his iconic, and often ironic, portraits. Nicole Kidman, Dennis Hopper, Kevin Spacey, Stephen Fry, Damien Hirst, Sienna Miller, Rupert Murdoch, Grayson Perry, Tony Blair and Prince Philip are just a selection of the many household names who have sat for Yeo. Renowned for his distinctive, highly figurative canvases and controversial collages, he employs a range of media and techniques to create a diverse body of work that expands the traditions of portraiture while examining contemporary perceptions of beauty, celebrity and power.

Coinciding with a retrospective exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery, The Many Faces of Jonathan Yeo is the first major publication on the artist. Featuring his most popular paintings, drawings, collages and prints, the book also presents several new important canvases never seen before. Alongside his intimate portraits of well-known sitters are dramatic and unsettling studies of cosmetic-surgery patients that document the compulsive and painful pursuit of physical perfection.

Photographs of the studio and works in progress reveal Yeo’s practice, while contributions from his subjects lift the lid on what it is like to be scrutinized by his exacting, forensic eye and to have oneself captured on canvas for ever. Martin Gayford discusses Yeo’s practice within the traditions of portraiture and compares the experience of being painted by him with that of sitting for Lucian Freud; Giles Coren offers revealing insights from the perspective of close personal friend and contemporary; Tim Marlow interprets the significance of Yeo’s political portraits; while a wide-ranging interview with Sarah Howgate, curator of the National Portrait Gallery show, considers the genesis of Yeo’s work and the relationships with his subjects. More than a monograph on a single artist, this book is also an enlightening exploration of the state of portraiture today, giving an insight into the risks faced by both portraitist and sitter.

Martin Gayford has been art critic for the Spectator and the Sunday Telegraph and is currently chief art critic for Bloomberg News. He is the author of The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles, Constable in Love: Love, Landscape, Money and the Making of a Great Painter, Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud and A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney.

Giles Coren is a writer, food critic and television presenter. He has been a columnist for The Times since 1993 and was named ‘Food and Drink Writer of the Year’ in 2005. He is the author of How to Eat Out, Anger Management for Beginners and the novel Winkler.

Tim Marlow is a writer, broadcaster, art historian and director of artistic programmes at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. The former director of exhibitions at White Cube, he has presented numerous television and radio programmes and has written for many newspapers and periodicals. His books include studies of Auguste Rodin and Egon Schiele.

Sarah Howgate has been Contemporary Curator at the National Portrait Gallery since 2001. Among many exhibitions, commissions and displays, she has curated ‘David Hockney Portraits’, ‘Lucian Freud Portraits’ and ‘Alex Katz Portraits’. Publications include The Portrait Now (with Sandy Nairne), David Hockney Portraits and Lucian Freud Portraits. 

 CNN Ones to Watch (3 parts)