Gideon Rubin

Coinciding with a touring exhibition, this book is the first monograph on the acclaimed Israeli painter Gideon Rubin. After witnessing the events of 9/11 in New York first hand, Rubin turned his back on his realist way of working and embarked on a method that has become his signature style. Using found photographs, magazines and newspapers as his primary source material, he paints portraits - faceless portraits. These small, unnerving paintings of featureless figures, full of life but empty of expression, are charming and chilling in equal measure. This exquisite book features high-quality reproductions of dozens of works and numerous photographs of the artist and the studio. Four writers examine how Rubin both challenges and extends the traditions of European painted portraiture. They also consider how he employs oil paint to stake a claim for the renewed relevance and enduring value of the hand-crafted picture, and to question the relative status of photography as the supposed carrier of 'truth'.