Alexandra Rubinstein
The Moon Also Rises
June 9 - July 29, 2022

Mother is pleased to present The Moon Also Rises, Alexandra Rubinstein’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show will run from June 9th through July 16th, 2022. Mother | Manhattan is located at 368 Broadway in Tribeca, #415.

As he had been thinking for months about leaving his wife and had not done it because it would be too cruel to deprive her of himself...
—Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926)

Alexandra Rubinstein’s first solo show in New York was called Dick Diaries (2020)—an unabashed, often front-drive view of male genitalia as office workers (attentive, erect), odalisques (supine, think: Ingres), psychoanalytic subjects (draped on couches), vain models (gazing into mirrors) or fleshy, wrinkled clothes (to be ironed). However, already in 2016, Rubinstein was garnering critical attention across channels of social media, including GQ magazine, Juxtapoz, and Huffington Post, just to name a few. Her sharp, biting wit and fearless representation of explicit heterosexual desire both delighted and infuriated; beguiled and shocked the masses.

Rubinstein’s earliest work focused largely on female pleasure either in the form of depicting deterritorialized sex toys—made anew by reimagining them as a child’s mobile (little, sweet colorful dildos swaying in the air) or as phallic animals: dolphins, beavers, panthers, sea horses, and storks (without a baby in tow). Shortly after, however, she made a series of paintings that depicted primarily female reaction shots modeled after vintage porn films inspired by Behind the Green Door (1972) and Looking for Mr. Goodsex (1985). These faces revealed what Rubinstein called “vulnerability and withdrawal,” rather than sexual gratification. And, it's this kind of ambivalent expression, both exposed and guarded, that she begins transposing onto both the faces and sexual organs of men. Boy with Pink Nuts (2019), Tough Guy (2019), White Guy (2018), Manvious (painted with her own menstrual blood) (2021) all depict male nudes with physiognomies that exude the kind of contradictory tensions that “being looked at” elicits. Both demure and performative, these male nudes reverse the terms of the classical representation of the heterosexual male gaze turned on, as it was, by female objectification.

Other Rubinstein inversions similarly flip gendered positions (in the ongoing series A Dream Come True (Celebrity Cunnilingus) (2015-) “male heart throbs eat pussy”), as well as simply poke fun at the over-representation of white, male heroic, and nationalistic narratives in Western painting. For example, Gustave Courbet’s Origin of the World (1866) is “handled” in three different lush oil-on-canvas works by Rubinstein, skillfully mapping the splayed male genitalia, thighs and exposed partial chest, almost point for point, from Courbet’s female subject and aptly named: The Origin of the World’s Problems (2018), The Origin of Entitlement (2019), and The Origin of Anxiety (2019). And while she translates many other iconic works—Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam (1508-12) becomes the Creation of Adam’s Dick (2019), René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe) (1929) becomes, well, you guessed it: This is not a [Dick], and Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930) is directly referenced in American Go-Thick (2019) (the farmer’s hand is not holding a pitchfork)—it is her faux Courbet series that sets the stage for her current exhibition of works in The Moon Also Rises (2022).

In The Origin of the World’s Problems, Rubinstein has probably painted one of the most relaxed, but precarious penises in the history of Western Art. Hanging as it does to one side with its ball-sack suggesting tumescent labia, rather than an attending male scrotum, it invites the viewer to explore the rest of the exposed male body that features a seemingly soft, grassy landscape. The latter suggests a trail that leads up to an almost perfect little navel and onto more grassy knolls, albeit sparser as they begin to disappear in between the valley of the chest. Indeed, a kind of worlding is happening here in which the soft male body (and its flaccid member) stands in for a much larger universe than the Dick-Objects that usually populate Rubinstein’s work.

Building on this earlier move, the seven shimmering oil-on-canvas works that compose The Moon Also Rises present fabulist depictions of nude men as meta-habitats. Over-turning the well-worn tropes of woman-as-landscape throughout the history of art, Rubinstein depicts the muscular curves of giant male backs, buttocks and thighs as waterways, horizons, mountain ranges, and desert dunes. In this new series, the aspirational, white cis-male body, becomes a macrocosm, or even a stand-in for the cosmos itself. As Susan Stewart has noted, our understanding and reception of the gigantic is deeply connected to ideas of the sublime—qualities that evoke “obscurity, power, privations, vastness, infinity, difficulty (requiring vast expenditures of labor and effort) and magnificence.”* In The Moon Also Rises 01, Rubinstein emphasizes the colossal masculinity-as-landscape by using a Pre-Raphaelite-esque blue to color, and consequently conflate an enlarged male body and sky. Thus, the background of this particular painting seems to depict a metaverse within which a foregrounded miniature man-boy is diving, with ease, over a fallen log. While this scenario of an early evening moon-lit swim in a pond, fed by other-worldly waterfalls, seems, at first, innocuous, even idyllic—it signals, as Rubinstein has described, the specter of severe climate change, of environmental crisis (manifested, off screen, by the melting of the polar ice caps). The latter phenomenon is just one contemporary iteration of what Timothy Morton has called a hyperobject: a term that describes majestic forces, “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.”** Examples include a black hole, the Florida Everglades, the biosphere, the solar system and any of the tragic environmental crises that have occurred over the last century, caused by numerous, reckless human invention, invasion, and manufacturing such as the deforestation of the Amazonian rain forests, the extinction of numerous species, ocean acidification, and ozone layer depletion, just to name a few. Although Morton defines hyperobjects as “strictly physical,” contemporary feminists such as Katherine Behar think otherwise, pointing to patriarchy, colonialism, racism, and capitalism as insidiously distributed systems.***

Rubinstein, intoning the Post WW1 new man represented by the protagonist Jake Barnes in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises – who is empathetic, literary, and ultimately, impotent (from an injury in the war), attempts to capture what might be a new hyperobject. The expanded male body in The Moon Also Rises 04 is so skillfully treated as a malleable, organic landscape material that, as a viewer, one might not skip a visual beat as one’s eye moves from pubic mound to desert bush to armpit hair. The folds and ripples of the male chest match, almost mark for mark, the uneven, rolling undulations of desertscape. Moreover, the setting sun is intergalactically in tune with the body’s nipples, their stunning glow far upstaging the earthy, resting genitalia. It is this kind of displacement, this relatively new focus on contemporary, feminist, and queer influenced masculinity on cis-white, male culture that Rubinstein studies in The Moon Also Rises. She creates seemingly undifferentiated, fantastical topographies of male erogenous zones—the kind that invite you in, promise you nights of moon-lit mystery and sunset-worthy romance on the sinister edge of an extremely active—larger than life—hyperobject.

—Cash (Melissa) Ragona, June 2022

*Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 74.
**Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 1.
***Katherine Behar, “An Introduction to OOF,” Object-Oriented Feminism, Katherine Behar, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 7.

Alexandra Rubinstein (b. 1988 Yekaterinburg, Russia) is a Brooklyn-based conceptual artist working in painting, drawing and mixed media. Inspired by her adolescent (and ongoing) trauma, Rubinstein’s work explores the relationships between gender, power, consumption, and culture. By combining mundane and familiar images with the explicit in rich, thick color, she creates a shock-value painted narrative that challenges long- standing social constructs. Though rarely depicting women, her work still includes both the (cisgender, heterosexual) female gaze and presence, via the bodies of men, depicted as passive and subject to scrutiny. With the sole focus on male genitalia–and a keen eye for gendered irony—Rubinstein introduces a conversation about traditional masculinity and how it intimidates, oppresses, and has played a role in shaping our present social landscape.

Rubinstein immigrated to the United States in 1997 and earned her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA) in 2010. She has been working in New York ever since. Rubinstein has exhibited at The Hewitt Gallery of Art (Marymount Manhattan College, New York, NY), Spring Break Art Fair (New York, NY), Satellite Art Show (Brooklyn, NY), The Established Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), The Untitled Space (New York, NY), The Outlet (Brooklyn NY), The Royal (Brooklyn, NY), Proto Gallery (Hoboken, NJ), Fort Wayne Museum of Art (Fort Wayne, IN), and The Wing (Brooklyn, NY). Her work has been featured in numerous publications, including Hyperallergic, Cosmopolitan, Huffington Post, Paper Mag, Juxtapoz, Forbes, GQ, Playboy, Broad City, Desus and Nero. Her work was also featured on HBO news program Real Time with Bill Maher.