Provocation Heather Bause Rubinstein

Heather Bause Rubinstein (b. 1975, Englewood, NJ; lives and works in New York, US) presents Provocation, her second solo show with Ruttkowski;68. The Bochum exhibition brings together six new paintings made during the artist’s return to Düsseldorf in the summer of 2026.

Bause Rubinstein’s abstractions are physical, intuitive, and hard won. There is an urgency to their making, one decision pressing against the next. Broad strokes sweep across the canvas, crossing and overtaking one another; color builds and bleeds into drips, while passages of white paint cover earlier marks and clear space for what comes next. She works by adding and pruning, following one impulse with another but never entirely erasing where she has been, so that each painting keeps a record of its own making. Her abstractions hover at the edge of recognition, giving the eye just enough to find its bearings before pulling certainty away again.

Bause Rubinstein grapples with abstraction itself, and with our human instinct to find something recognizable within it. The gardener sees a garden; the hunter sees a forest; the sailor sees a storm. What we find in a painting inevitably carries something of ourselves. The paintings invite these projections, but refuse to resolve them. Looking becomes an encounter, a negotiation, at times even a confrontation.

For three of the works, that confrontation continues in poetry. Bause Rubinstein’s husband, the poet and critic Raphael Rubinstein, takes on each painting with a poem, shaped by the unusual intimacy of a writer responding to the work of his partner. The poems are not translations. They are ripostes, each provoked by an act of looking.

The painting strikes. The viewer strikes back.

 

Opening reception     2026/09/13      2–6 pm

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