Gideon Rubin, Hair Clip, 2020. Oil on linen, 50.5 x 50cm. Courtesy: the artist and Fox Jensen Gallery, Sydney.

There is much about Gideon Rubin’s paintings that carry or rather transmit something crucial about optimism. Amidst the tender introspection and melancholia that accompanies some of his images and the sheer joy and sensuality that radiates from others, Rubin’s special capacity is to remind us about longing and desire, about loss and lament – and about hope and what it means to feel.

These are paintings that seamlessly merge ideas and aesthetics. Rubin understands that painting is in itself conceptual but that our digestion of art is a profoundly sensate proposition and without this capacity to feel, in either making and indeed reception, then we are going to be left wanting. No such fate here.

Follow this artist