Benrubi Gallery is pleased to announce an ONLINE exhibition of new work by Massimo Vitali.  As the COVID-19 pandemic rendered most public space around the world off limits, Vitali headed back to the beaches he has for so long documented. Since the end of the lockdowns in Italy, "the new normal" has become the go-to term to describe the reality of a world hit by COVID-19. It is a "new" way of living, full of precautions, hygiene measures and habits that seem to have changed our behavior, and eroded the sociability and proximity that characterize the human race. Massimo Vitali went to the beach once more, to observe the new normal. The densely populated environment—one of his favorite subjects—once more proved to be curiously normal.

The urge to be out in the open air, seeing friends, making the most of the sea and sun, diving into the water and leaving behind the worries of the week: all that is still there. A few masks, some nifty footwork to avoid strangers and maintain social distancing, and a mostly Italian rather than international population form the backdrop to these images. Nonetheless, those elements are not what first catches the viewer's eye. Just as the week's worries are left behind, this new normal that everyone is talking about did not make it to the beach. Instead, a sort of collective ritual of rebirth occurred, with the sea and sun seeming to repel the virus that has been mysteriously shadowing us for several months.

For press and other inquiries, please email: info@benrubigallery.com

Press Release

Benrubi is pleased to present Lumination by Jude Broughan, a captivating new suite of eight unique works relating to the eight phases of the Lunar month. Broughan combines original photography with painting, printmaking, and natural and synthetic fabrics. These diverse elements are sliced, stitched, and stuck together in formal compositions, which are both abstracted and allegorical. 

Eight phases of the Moon

Many moons to go

Night swimming, mysterious wildlife

Leaves decompose and algae grow

Water Nature’s midwife

All born bare in the flow

- Jude Broughan

“Broughan inhabits two worlds: one visible, one internal. She’s shooting a real place, but she’s experiencing it like a shard of half forgotten memory… [she] places her subjects in personal, rather than general social contexts. Or, rather, she wishes to re-personalize the general social context: a dream all emigrants share”

- Ratik Asokan, Village Voice

Jude Broughan is New Zealand-born artist, now based in Brooklyn, New York.  She has had solo exhibitions at venues including Marisa Newman Projects, New York (2017), Benrubi Gallery, New York (2017), Calder and Lawson Gallery, Hamilton, New Zealand (2015), Dimensions Variable, Miami (2014), and Churner & Churner, New York (2014). She has been included in many group exhibitions, at venues including Bakehouse Art Complex, Miami (2019); Jarvis Dooney Gallerie, Berlin (2018); Document, Chicago (2017); Sanderson Contemporary Art, Auckland, New Zealand (2017); Magnan Metz, New York (2015); Dorfman Projects, New York (2015); Youme Haus, Brooklyn (2014); and the Essl Museum, Vienna (2013).

Broughan received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, an MFA from Hunter College, and is a 2015 Pollock-Krasner Foundation grantee. She currently teaches art at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the State University of New York College at Old Westbury.

Broughan’s work has been discussed in Art in America, Blouin Artinfo, Collector Daily, Eye Contact, the Village Voice, and Whitehot Magazine, among others. 

For press and other inquiries, please email: info@benrubigallery.com

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Night Swimming  artists' book

In conjunction with Lumination, we are pleased to present Jude Broughan's new artists' book NightSwimming. It features the eight works from the online exhibition, which relate to the eight phases of the Lunar month. The poems come from notes Broughan writes on the floor while making the works. One symbol throughout is the pool as a metaphor for society, and ideas around that.

Attached here is a pdf of NightSwimming for you to enjoy. There will be a limited print edition forthcoming.

NightSwimming JudeBroughan.pdf

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In Silence brings together excerpts from four different bodies of Doug Hall’s work spanning over twenty years that explore the theme of archives through its quintessential medium—photography. The earliest work is from The Archive Project (1995-96), created while Hall was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome. These photographs of ancient archives in Naples and Rome reveal a humanist need to order that is being replaced and made widely available through the internet, furthering a process of democratization Hall characterizes as “devour[ing] epistemological palpability, its aura as well as its vain will to order.  

Doug Hall has worked for over 40 years in a wide range of media, including performance, installation, video, and large format photography. In the 1970s he became prominent for his collaborative work with the media art collective, T. R. Uthco, which, among many other works, created the video and installation, The Eternal Frame, 1976 (in collaboration with Ant Farm), a reenactment of the Kennedy assassination, filmed in Dealey Plaza, Dallas. Public collections include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Contemporary Art Museum, Chicago; The Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, California; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Vienna; The San Jose Museum of Art, California; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Among the grants and fellowships he has received are those from The National Endowment for the Arts, The California Arts Council, The Fulbright Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, and The Guggenheim Foundation. He is the co-editor (with Sally Jo Fifer) of Illuminating Video (1991, Aperture Books, New York). Hall is represented by Benrubi Gallery in New York City and Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco. He is Professor Emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute.
 
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Gallery hours: Tuesday - Saturday 10-6pm

Press Release

Benrubi Gallery is pleased to announce its first exhibition with artist KangHee Kim.

Dreamer presents a series of photographs that collage street scenes from New York with landscapes and details from locations that Kim has visited throughout the country. Using mundane encounters from her everyday errands in New York as her starting point, Kim manipulates her photographs to construct images that convey a kind of surreal escapism, one that is free from the limits or restraints of reality.

Due to the restriction of her VISA status, Kim has been unable to leave the United States—meaning she has not returned to her home country of South Korea for over ten years. Instead, she builds photographs to create new spaces and fictional experiences that allow for a sense of liberation and infinite possibility. It’s in the seemingly impossible merging of two or more environments that she finds their spark.

Kim thinks of these photographs as paintings, where slight imperfections from the post-production process act as an equivalent to mark-making.  She believes that “small imperfections are human; they are what makes people attractive.”
 
KangHee Kim (b. 1991, Korea) works and lives in NYC. She holds a B.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art and has shown extensively in group and solo exhibitions throughout the US, South Korea and Japan.
 
 
For press and other inquiries, please email: info@benrubigallery.com
Gallery hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10-6pm

Press Release

Benrubi Gallery is pleased to announce EXTREMES, a new body of works by Brooklyn-based artist Rey Parlá.
This exhibition is a continuation and expansion of defining new photography without limits through improvisational compositions. The study of line, luminosity, abstraction, self-examination, concrete, pictorial conditions, and their possibilities are further explored in EXTREMES. The sensuous and luminous photographs here are objects presented – they only represent themselves and not the natural world. The works are pictures of the evolution of photography.

The focus of his imagery is guided in the intuitive process that gives birth to a personal concrete work formulated by introspection, improvisation, reflection, and links technology with Parlá's haptic human touch. This allows Parlá to arrange and design works with "multiple compositions," a borderless and non-hierarchical universe, which can be rotated vertically or horizontally as desired – the focal point is up to the viewers, so that in this way they may better access the artist's system of choices. This series, in particular, is partly inspired by Cuban American artist Carmen Herrera's work, and Sanzo Wada's color theory book of the 1930s, a Japanese artist and kimono designer.
Originally trained as a filmmaker, Rey Parlá continues to defy categorization with interest in a variety of methods to produce abstract optical works that are multiple singularities of illusory creations. Inspired by experimental cinema, Parlá has captured movement in a kind of freeze-frame that vibrates with a hum of silent breaths. These elements are woven together into a forward-thinking fabric presented as one unit. At once elemental and sophisticated, historical, and freshly contemporary, rigorously analytical, and full of uncertainty, the show is much like the global atmosphere both politically and environmentally. The works are lyrical and precisely intense with an elegiac aesthetic awareness of a cosmic uniformity at war. Parlá's mind is concerned with the creation of images rather than with photography in the conventional sense; although he is not divorced from the natural world of documentation, he lives the life of an artist between the illusory and the real on a bridging hyphen of concrete thoughts.
 
Rey Parlá (b. 1971, Florida) earned a B.A. in English Literature and a Certificate in Film
Studies from Florida International University in 2007. Parlá is a Cuban-American visual artist
working in photography, painting, and filmmaking. He first received recognition for his
“motion-paintings” at the 12th Annual Miami International Film Festival and has
collaborated with performance artist Natasha Tsakos in Miami Beach, Vanessa Gocksch of
Intermundos, and Ralph Falcón of Murk Records. Critical theorist, filmmaker, and
collaborator Michael Betancourt, has written about Rey’s film work. Parlá has lectured at
Savannah College of Art & Design on experimental time-based media and photography.
Parlá’s work has been exhibited in New York City and Tokyo. His works are in various
international private collections including the Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Collection.
 
For press and other inquiries, please email: info@benrubigallery.com
Gallery hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10-6pm

Press Release