"PERMANENT EMBRACE" WALTER ROBINSTON & ADRIANNE RUBENSTEIN: Brussels

I have paintings of people kissing, I’ve always liked images of passionate romance. And paintings of women with guns, a more recent theme inspired by Donald Trump. I like the nurse paintings especially because they represent a vocation of caring that is modeled speci cally for women, and because of Richard Prince. The still lifes of aspirin and liquor go together; they’re both painkillers. The cheeseburgers are about natural hunger that has been commodi ed, but they also have a metaphysical dimension : Like people, cheeseburgers are all the same and each unique. I like to think of them as a peculiar metaphor for contemporary life. Generally speaking, I paint my desires, and things that people want.

About her work, Rubenstein writes :

I guess the bottom line with my paintings is that they are made up but with a pastiche of references, hopefully rendered illegible. Please do not read ahead if you dislike spoilers. In these there’s a smile to Birdie Lusch who I discovered at Kerry Schuss a while back. Her collages are charming and economical but what really struck me about them is that she had a day job and made them at night, like Octavia But-ler. The one that says ‘LOVE’ is a painting of a Waggy Tee, which is a kind of art made by a young woman in Los Angeles, Nora Jane Slade, that I adore. She paints on used t-shirts that remind me of summer camp, with references to socialism and transexual identity, along with owers and hippieish wishes. The painting with the rainbow, «Needle in a Haystack,» is a made-up landscape with symbols for good luck cluttered together like a badly designed sticker book collection. Another painting shows an old fashioned camera pictured from both sides, like it would be if you were buying or selling it on eBay. Lastly, the pink painting with birds references a Laura Owens from 1997 that she designed with Kid Pix, a computer program I played with as a child. I transferred the blue sky of her landscape into the inside of a broccoli frame, whichis one of my favorite motifs

Walter Robinson is a New York painter and art critic. This is his second exhibition at Stems Gallery. He has previously shown his paintings at Jeffrey Deitch in 2016 and in «Fast Forward: Painting from the 1980s» at the Whitney Museum. An exhibition of new work, «The Americans,» opened last summer at Vito Schnabel in St. Moritz. As a critic, Robinson was founding editor of Artnet Magazine, and also wrote on art for Art in America, Artspace.com, the East Village Eye and the New York Observer.

Adrianne Rubenstein is an artist and curator based in New York, this is the rst exhibition of her paintings at Stems Gallery. Solo shows include Reyes Projects, Birmingham, MI (2017); Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, OR (2017); White Columns, New York (2016); and The Pit, Los Angeles (2016). Curatorial projects include ‘Geranium’ at Stems Gallery, Brussels (2017); ’We Might not have a planet left soon’ at 68projects in Berlin (2017); ‘Fort Greene’ at Venus Los Angeles (2016), ’Snail Salon’ at Regina Rex (2013), New York; and ‘Forget About the Sweetbreads’, co-curated with Joanne Geenbaum at James Fuentes, New York (2013). Rubenstein’s work has been covered by The New York Times, Artforum and W Magazine.