15.9 x 21 cm
Bruno David presents Traveling, an exhibition of new work in painting and printmaking by mixed media artist Yvette Drury Dubinsky. This is theartist’s seventh solo exhibition with the gallery.
Meditating on the passage of time, the show presents work that is a result of the inevitable interplay between an artist’s solitary workings in her studio and those of a turmoiled outside world. Many works in the exhibition—including several paintings on handmade paper and repurposed medicine and art supply boxes—are small and portable, made between 2021 and Spring, 2023 at points during the pandemic when travel to visit family was possible but meant a lack of studio. Earlier works, 2021 and 2022 memorialize the rapid changes and prolonged grief of the last several years, layering words that became newly charged—sourdough and shelter—with the names of those who succumbed to the virus in the early stages of the pandemic in 2020.
While serious in subject matter, Dubinsky’s work is also intuitive and playful—a metaphor for a multifaceted life. The medicine boxes, for example, while chosen for their idiosyncratic shapes when deconstructed and made supports for painting, are also a byproduct of the increased use of over-the-counter medications by an aging artist. On these informal surfaces, Dubinsky layers wildly colorful and sometimes repellant mixes of gesso, ink, pencil, crayon, and gouache, employing an experimental blend of painting and printmaking techniques.
The largest work in this exhibition, a monotype titled Anguish (2022), was begun to augment a series of smaller individual works already in progress when Ukraine was invaded by Russia in February 2022 and left much of the world stunned, horrified, and immobilized. Working in her studio as the violence in Eastern Europe escalated, Dubinsky found herself assembling a new work in reaction to the conflict, its resulting migrations, and thinking of her mother.
A century ago, as a child, Dubinsky’s mother fled war just north of what is now Ukraine, trapped for a time in the basement of an occupied house. Dubinsky recalls that her mother never fully processed the exodus or talked about her childhood, spending her later life traumatized by the violence and uprooting she had experienced. Following the news, Dubinsky feels, as she did in her youth, both captivated and powerless to ease the trauma she witnessed firsthand.
Yvette Drury Dubinsky, based in St. Louis, MO, Truro, MA, and NYC, earned her M.F.A. from the Sam Fox School at Washington University, St. Louis, where she has also twice received distinguished alumni awards. She is also a New York member of A.I.R. gallery. In concurrence with the exhibition, Bruno David Gallery Publications will publish an exhibition catalog of the artist’s work with an exhibition history and bibliography.
