Marfa Country Clinic is hosting Bonus Tracks, the first exhibition in the United States by French artist Sivan L. Rubinstein, featuring paintings on wood and canvas from 2000 to 2016. American pop culture, and more specifically music culture, is at the center of Rubinstein’s practice. Her works celebrate the images, the graphics, the materials and tools of music production and distribution.

An opening reception will be held on Friday March 20, 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at Marfa Country Clinic, 105 East Oak Street. The exhibition will be on display until May 29.

Rubinstein’s pictorial vocabulary is vast and extends from pixelated portraits of music icons to album covers, trompe l’oeil paintings of music libraries, and more recently, abstract paintings derived, though more and more loosely, from sound editing tools and graphs. The exhibition Bonus Tracks focuses on some of the more figurative works.

For over 20 years Rubinstein has painted a vast collection of album covers of the late 20th-early 21st century music, from pop to hip-hop, R&B, rock’n’roll, electronic, minimalist music, and more. Together they form a fairly exhaustive discography of that era, accompanying the industry’s transition from analog to digital. The clean mass-produced designs of LP covers, recorded blank cassette tapes and CDs are reproduced in paint on reclaimed pieces of wood, more or less to size.

As music evolves toward complete dematerialization, Rubinstein’s works glorifies the role the visual elements created to give body to the sounds played on making the music of that era so unforgettable. Album covers of The Beastie Boys, The Clash, Santana are some that were selected for this exhibition. Far from mechanical reproductions, the works have deliberately imperfect brushstrokes, smeared edges, and variation of board thickness, making them portraits rather than nostalgic icons.

The excerpted motifs reveal their aura, their overlapping histories, or, as the artist herself states, their “structure, usages and resonances”. Sivan L. Rubinstein graduated from the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, France in 2002. Her work has been widely exhibited in France since 2002, including, most recently, at the Philharmonie de Paris and the Galerie Ici, Paris. 

For information on the exhibition please email Valerie Breuvart: marfacountryclinic@gmail.com.