Heather Rubinstein

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Artist statement

My work signals its history from the visual systems and history of textiles. I create large scale textile works using materials sourced exclusively from thrift stores. I primarily paint on domestic items like: bed sheets, duvets, linens, drapes, crochet, lace, cheap designer scarves, vintage women's business suits, and other unidentifiable discards. I subject these textiles to various procedures, (folding, crumpling, staining, dyeing, bleaching, patterning, brushwork, cutting, stitching, erasure by washing machine), in order to create “source material,” often redolent of my childhood in the 1970s and 1980s. This source material (both recto and verso), will later be cut up and sewn together into a larger, textile-fabric-painting; or used in installation. As a painter, I love the porousness and flexible qualities of the materials, how the unfinished fabrics absorb pigment so easily—you don’t get that with conventional canvas. I respect their status as recycled, repurposed products, and I am aware of how my processes relate to the traditional domain of women. There is definitely a feminist subtext in my use /misuse of these domestic items. My paintings are informed by postwar European abstraction (Sigmar Polke, Al Held and Sam Francis), the densely patterned interiors of Vuillard and Bonnard; gestural abstractions by Joan Mitchell and Cy Twombly, Rauschenberg’s Combines and Spreads, deconstructive 1970s painters like Alan Shields and Al Loving, French painters Simon Hantaï,...

Artwork