John Dubrow
Lori Bookstein Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent work by John Dubrow. This is the artist's sixth solo-show with the gallery. John Dubrow: Recent Work will be comprised of recent playground paintings as well as three recent group portraits.
The artist's recent paintings are typically formed over prolonged engagements, lasting as long as two or three years, in which the compositions are continually reworked. Applying copious amounts of paint by the palette knife, these latest works have surfaces that look more like polychrome cement than dried paint. Nevertheless, the artist is able to modify these compositions with a frequency that seems to mimic the restless rhythm of the playgrounds he paints. Drawn to the dynamism of these environments, Dubrow captures a moment of stillness tinged with the possibility of freneticism.
There is also a noticeably greater preoccupation in the recent work with the ways in which subjects and forms interact. (The artist's oeuvre has predominately consisted mostly of singular portraits as well as urban and rural landscape.) The playground paintings, in particular, offer a varied scale of subject matter - from child to adolescent to adult - in states of varied interaction and awareness. Likewise, his portraits, all of two or more people, exhibit a tangible awareness between the subjects. The presence of these additional subjects in the portraits attests to the ways in which we comport ourselves in the presence of others and the degree to which we do so. Thus, the interaction between artist and patron is markedly different than that between mother and child and even more so than the innocently oblivious interactions between children on the playground.
This show coincides with the exhibition, A Formal Realist: The Works of John Dubrow, at The Demuth Museum, Lancaster, PA, which will remain on view from March 1 - May 19, 2013. A comprehensive, full-color catalogue is available.
John Dubrow was born in 1958 in Salem, Massachusetts. He received a BFA and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (1979-83), where he studied painting under Bruce McGaw and Julius Hatofsky. Since 1983, Dubrow has been based in New York City. His paintings are included in several public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Dubois Institute at Harvard University, the Hilton Hotels Corporation and the National Academy of Design. He is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, the National Academy of Design’s Truman Prize and Carnegie Prize and the Port Authority World Views Project at the World Trade Center.
John Dubrow: Recent Work will be on view from March 21 - April 20, 2013. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, March 21st from 6-8 pm. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:30 am to 6:00 pm. For additional information and/or visual materials, please contact the gallery at (212) 750-0949 or by email at info@loribooksteinfineart.com.