Gideon Rubin’s most recent work follows several years of working with magazines and publications dating from the first half of the 20th century. The title of Rubin’s latest exhibition – “Warning Shadows” – is borrowed from a 1923 Weimar Cinema film of the same title, in which a puppeteer uses shadow theatre to show the audience the consequences of acting upon their desires. The title alludes to the warning signs throughout history that point to the writing on the wall. 

 

Rubin worked with imagery taken from magazines, films and newspapers for his exhibition at the Freud Museum, London (2018); where he painted over - censoring and altering - images that originated from Germany in the years leading up to WW2.

 

Following his exhibition at the Freud museum, Rubin completed an artist residency in LA, where he focused on Hollywood images from the 50’s - a politically-charged decade that reflected a difficult period in the film industry’s history. Rubin’s work in LA continued the theme of the Freud Museum exhibition while further relating to modern-day social and political turmoil in more recent decades. 

 

Returning to London, in a second-hand bookshop Rubin came across a book on the stars of the Weimar Cinema with imagery that ignited his most recent series of paintings. The images of the Weimar films combine several aspects of Rubin's work - the time between the wars, the culture and media of that period and the characters that have come to represent those times in our collective memory. 

 

Shot in black-and-white, the films of the Weimar cinema have a striking aesthetic with extraordinary attention given to the detailed sets and costumes. Rubin painted the Weimar actors and actresses, focusing in particular on the films Madchen in Uniform (1931), Menschen am Sonntag (1930) and Die Todesschleife (1928). 

 

Also on display are works from the series ‘Travel Paintings’. In 2016 Rubin took part in a residency programme (supported by Galerie Karsten Greve and Outset), which was an artistic exchange between China and Israel. In the project titled ‘Places of Conflict’, the Chinese video artist, Chen Ran, traveled to Israel, while Gideon Rubin visited Xinjiang – a province in China that is subject to increasingly more extreme government control and oppression. 

 

The aim was to make works that reflected upon and reacted to the situation that each artist encountered on the ground in their respective hosting countries, which focused on places of conflict. The resulting works capture the atmosphere in an area that is deeply affected by political and cultural turmoil, acting as a snapshot of the everyday lives of those populations affected and challenged by conflict. The ‘Travel Paintings’ series consists of 27 small-format oil paintings on linen that document a range of subjects from the interior of a hotel room and clothes drying on a line, as well as the more extreme aspects of life in Xinjiang, such as the presence of armoured vehicles and police on the streets. 

 

Both series presented in ‘Warning Shadows’ question our ability to learn a lesson from history, exploring how it informs and mirrors the present day.