Raphael Rubinstein

"Reinventing Abstraction" looks at 15 painters born between 1939 and 1949: Carroll Dunham, Louise Fishman, Mary Heilmann, Bill Jensen, Jonathan Lasker, Stephen Mueller, Elizabeth Murray, Thomas Nozkowski, David Reed, Joan Snyder, Pat Steir, Gary Stephan, Stanley Whitney, Jack Whitten and Terry Winters. Challenging official accounts of the decade, which tend to ignore the individualistic abstraction exemplified by these painters in favor of more easily identifiable movements and styles, Rubinstein chronicles how, around 1980, a generation of New York painters embraced elements that had been largely excluded from the radical, deconstructive abstraction of the late 1960s and 1970s, which had influenced many of them. In a long, informative essay titled "The Lure of the Impure," Rubinstein seeks to uncover the "street history" of painting, and redress past, sometimes race-based exclusions. Although many of the artists in "Reinventing Abstraction" are well known, their collective history has not yet been addressed by art history.

New York Painting in the 1980s

Reinventing Abstraction

This book brings together 35 of Raphael Rubinstein's mose noteworthy essays on contemporary art.

Selected Art Criticism 1990-2002

Polychrome Profusion

Paper Monument (Organization)

The Miraculous

Albert Oehlen

Albert Oehlen (*1954 in Krefeld, Germany), a student of Sigmar Polke and close friend of Martin Kippenberger, is known to be a provocateur for challenging the boundaries of painting and embracing a remarkably wide range of styles. The publication Grau is an intimate examination of his series of grey paintings created between 1997 and 2008. Oscillating between figuration and abstraction, the paintings defy conventional categorization. Amid muddy nebulas and amorphic brushstrokes, mysterious depictions of figures, objects, environments, and landscapes emerge. In opposition to other series where Oehlen also used digital tools, the grisailles are strictly made by hand without the distraction of color --an unmistakable nod to fellow German artist Gerhard Richter. The richly illustrated publication also contains an original text by writer and poet Raphael Rubinstein and an interview with artist Albert Oehlen himself.

Grau

Pat Steir

This monograph celebrates the "Waterfall" paintings of Pat Steir (born 1940), begun in 1989. Steir pours a mixture of pigment, oil and turpentine down a vertical canvas and waits for it to coalesce between layers, resulting in stratified compositions and overlapping color.

Raphael Rubinstein

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