In this recently made video, Lydia Rubio explain the process and concepts behind her multipanel painting, LOT 24. LOT 24 dives into topics of exile, queerness, war, and personal commentaries. It is based on an appropriation of Rubens’ ‘Exodus from Sodom and Gomorrah’ which is in the permanent collections of the Bass Museum of Art and Ringling Museum of Art in Florida. LOT 24 is installed in her studio in Hudson, NY.
Oil on panel 2017
30 x 30 x 2 inches
Lydia Rubio (Havana, 1946) is a multidisciplinary artist who has received international recognition and has established herself in the United States since 1960. She has traveled extensively through Europe and Latin America (…). She currently lives in Miami. She has a Master’s in Architecture from the School of Design of Harvard University and a BA in Architecture from the University of Florida and has carried out studies in the Università degli Studi, Florence, Italy. She has been a professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Parsons School of Design and in the University of Puerto Rico.
She emerges as a professional artist in 1980 and her multidisciplinary works stand out for the use of words together with images, in paintings and installations, architecturally integrated through panels carried out with mastery, acuteness and excellent execution.
The profile of her visual repertoire is based on a research on the imagined or perceived representation of nature, artistically expressed as a result of the visibility of the union of the real and the symbolic, which is the central point of her aesthetic proposal. (…) Her aesthetic discourse is connected with Russian constructivism and the Cuban and Brazilian concrete art movement, which had an influence on her artistic style. [ READ MORE ENGLISH / SPANISH ]
THE JOURNEY ITSELF IS THE HOME: THE ART OF LYDIA RUBIO
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Lydia Rubio was born in Havana, Cuba, and grew up there during the 1950’s. She has strong memories of her grandmother, who was an artist, and has honored their relationship in the painting, She Painted Landscapes, a dazzling trompe l’oeil work which undercuts its myriad of illusionistic details with both dramatic shifts in scale and open-ended juxtapositions. In She Painted Landscapes, Rubio combines fragments of ordinary reality with the mysterious, often multiple narratives underlying one’s dreams, with the pull of both memory and imagination. Everything jostles together. The viewer cannot say whether the painting is of a dreamscape inhabited by fragments of memory and reality or a realist depiction haunted by memory and fragments recalled from different dreams. Such is the primal power of Rubio’s art; it calls the ordinary into question, as well as compels us to examine our belief that our everyday life is stable enough to withstand change, and that the earth we walk on is solid and dependable. Read the [FULL ARTICLE}