Brian Rutenberg: Reeds Rise

Click Here to View Digital Exhibition Catalog: For more than 45 years, Brian Rutenberg’s response to the natural world has melded together the seen and the imagined through masterful and unexpected combinations of color and generously applied oil paint. Rutenberg’s paintings are both conspicuous and instantly recognizable: high-keyed, fauvist-inflected color applied to the canvas with a rich physicality and vigorous texture. Rutenberg has a penchant for unexpected juxtapositions of intrepid color, layering patches of intense sapphire blue beneath strokes of pink taffy, or regions of cantaloupish orange that emerge from environments of earthy brown. These vibrant and energetic groups of color assert themselves with an idiosyncratic muscularity that bursts forward from the surfaces of his canvases. The title of this new exhibition references a poem by the 20th century American poet Samuel Menashe, “Reeds Rise from Water.” In a statement for the show, Rutenberg writes, “[This