GLEN RUBSAMEN
Selected Works
-
GLEN RUBSAMEN
‘419, 459, 469’, 2023
Acrylic on panel, 61 x 45,7 cm / 24 x 18 in -
GLEN RUBSAMEN
‘Low Weekly Rates’, 2024
Acrylic on panel, 91,5 x 122 cm / 36 x 48 in -
GLEN RUBSAMEN
‘Not another tired proverb’, 2005
Acrylic on panel, 100 cm x 130 cm -
GLEN RUBSAMEN
'Let‘s die friends', 2010
Acrylics on canvasm, 120 cm x 120 cm -
Glen Rubsamen
A Stranger in the Garden
91.5 x 91.5 cm
Acrylic on board
2014 -
Glen Rubsamen
Installation view 'Clear Channel', COSAR -
Glen Rubsamen
The Special Ending
75 x 100 cm
Acrylic on board
2013 -
Glen Rubsamen
Gallows Humor
60 x 50 cm
Acrylic on board
2014 -
Glen Rubsamen
Clear Channel
each photo 47 x 63 cm (63 x 47 cm framed)
Archival Inkjet Print
2014 -
Glen Rubsamen
Hide and Seek
91.5 x 122 cm
Acrylic on board
2014 -
Glen Rubsamen
Southbay
2008
Bue Ray Video, 3 sequences, 4 min. each -
Glen Rubsamen
Installation view 'La Nuit Américaine', COSAR -
Glen Rubsamen
Installation view 'La Nuit Américaine', COSAR -
Glen Rubsamen
Our Secret Is Safe
2008
Acrylic on linen
140 cm x 100 cm
Exhibitions
MOM AND POP CAPITALISM ‒ GLEN RUBSAMEN
-Environmental Catastrophes Top Ten and and other Abominations ‒ GLEN RUBSAMEN
-Clear Channel ‒ GLEN RUBSAMEN
-The Textual Crust:
Glen Rubsamen’s Mom-and-Pop Capitalism Paintings
Text by Adam Sterling
In the 1960s, Robert Venturi and I played a game we called “I can like something worse than you can like.
—Denise Scott Brown, “Denise Scott Brown,” Artforum, September 2010
When I first viewed Glen Rubsamen’s Mom-and-Pop Capitalism paintings, what struck me was how deliberately they work to collapse the distance, and therefore the distinction, between enthusiasm and skepticism and ultimately between documentation and critique. Above all, these paintings argue for a curious and open-minded anti-utopianism, for understanding signage in the landscape as nonfiction rather than poetic or symbolic—and then using that knowledge, systematically and patiently won, as the basis for a new type of realistic landscape painting. For Rubsamen, reading the plethora of texts hidden in the landscape is a way to be revolutionary. Not in an obvious way (interpreting at face value), but rather a more tolerant way, questioning how we look at things.
Rubsamen knows that Los Angeles makes a useful laboratory for studying the evolving urbanism of car-centric cities. In an interview for the Italian newspaper, ‘La Stampa’ (July 13, 2018) he recalled, “From an early age, I rode around LA in the back seat of a car dazed by the blazing sun and dazzled by the signs, both loving and hating what I saw, jolted by the extreme ugliness of this city.” Over three decades of painting, Rubsamen has mined his ambivalence about Los Angeles. A tribute to the ugly and ordinary, including many works about “ducks,” that is, commercial structures or signage that assumes the shape of what its selling. A donut shop with a giant donut on its roof, or paintings about “decorated sheds,” or expedient buildings that gain all their energy from signage. In short, the duck is a symbol; the decorated shed applies symbols to its lackluster facade.
In Quicksand (2024, acrylic on panel, 40 × 30 in.; 101.6 × 76.2 cm), we are confronted with a problem: Where to begin reading? From habit, we start at the upper left and read down to the lower right, as if the landscape mimicked the printed page. We see a symbol of a mustachioed gentleman (with a top hat) smoking a pipe and the words “Smoke Shop,” but we know better, this must be a cannabis dispensary, there is no market now for old-fashioned smoking paraphernalia, especially in a store next to a tattoo parlor. But given that the q in “Liquor” is missing and one sign is empty, it becomes apparent this is a shopping center in a state of flux.
Finally, we finish our reading with the words “Hair Salon”; now the textual component of our journey is over and we can look to other considerations. An enormous, ancient fan palm, which must sit on derelict land because it has never been pruned of its dead fronds, a lone streetlamp, a brownish, polluted sky that could be dusk or dawn, and finally, at the very bottom of the painting, a tiny city in the far distance, just above the horizon line. All these elements emerge instantaneously using our habitual and varied experience of looking at pictures. The acts of deciphering texts and comprehending images are separate and use different areas of the brain. Rubsamen’s painting is an exercise in survival training. Like animals that use all their facilities to assess danger (sight, smell, hearing), humans rely on their brain’s agility and every aspect of their cognizance to stay alive. I know I would not frequent any of this mini-mall’s establishments.
The textual crust, or the text that inhabits every nook and cranny of a cityscape, is different from the city-as-text, which can be read or comprehended theoretically. A crust implies a thin, hard, outer layer of visual and material properties, and it always appears to us in specific forms and places. Linguist Rodrigue Landry and social psychologist Richard Bourhis took up this concept as a foundation for their theory of texts in urban spaces, which they called the “linguistic landscape” (see their “Linguistic Landscape and Ethnolinguistic Vitality: An Empirical Study,” Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 16, no. 1, 1997, pp. 23–49). Linguistic landscapes are the sum of textual inscriptions present in an urban area, which span a variety of media and languages, offering an insight into urban sociology, geography, and culture. “The language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings combines to form the linguistic landscape of an urban agglomeration” (p. 23). Rubsamen paints the textual crust from below and within this agglomeration. Such a reading necessitates immersion within a city’s unique patterns of semiotic communication, which form distinctive textual and visual environments and hold intimations of its urban politics and sociologies. Material surface interventions feed back into the larger cultural powers that characterize urban spaces and are a reliable means of access to these powers.
Rubsamen insists on his prerogative to contribute to the dominant reading of urban environments. His paintings can be interpreted and measured through their surface interventions, making their presence apparent in the intricate dynamics of what Rubsamen calls “deadpanning.”
For him, this is depicting the cityscape in a manner coolly above the fray. It doesn’t try so hard or bear the signs of any theoretical camp but establishes an attentive and ostensibly nonjudgmental attitude. In that sense, the smoke screen of non-judgment allows these paintings to plausibly play as faux-naïfs even as they declare their own aesthetic manifesto.
Felix (2024, acrylic on panel, 30 × 40in; 76.2 × 101.6 cm) offers only one word to interpret. The Latin word for “happy,” “lucky,” or “blessed,” it implies a successful business transaction. Felix Chevrolet, the oldest automotive dealership in Los Angeles, was founded in 1921 by Winslow B. Felix and gained fame for its iconic Felix the Cat mascot, a cross-marketing partnership with the cartoon character’s creator, Pat Sullivan. Anthropomorphic, Felix was the first recurring animal character in American film animation. His famous pace—hands behind his back, head down, deep in thought—became a trademark analyzed by critics around the world. Aldous Huxley considered that the Felix cartoons proved that cinema was more socially responsible than literature.
Rubsamen’s use of a single word as the textual crust of this painting refers directly to West Coast conceptual artists such as Ed Ruscha (see Actual Size, 1961, featuring the word “Spam”) and John Baldassari (see Wrong, 1966–68). The name has such a range of associations and references that it overshadows the other symbols in the picture, the cartoon cat, cubistically seen from three different angles, the ancient sickly palms, the blue Chevrolet insignia, and the tiny American flag in the far distance. Felix is ultimately, heroically, a landscape painting and quite plausibly a realistic depiction of a unique place. This is the contradiction Guy Debord observed in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle: the downgrading from “having” to “appearing” within contemporary late capitalist society. He argued that social and commercial relationships between people had unwittingly become mediated by textual images, defining spectacle as “capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.” Here, the image of the name Felix has replaced any human emotional response to social interaction, including the idea of purchasing a new car. For Debord, spectacle was anything put up in lights (in this case neon). I think it refers to a Vegas-style showmanship, the thematization of text in words like “Sahara,” “Flamingo,” and “Mirage.”
The signage in Rubsamen’s Mom-and-Pop series acts fundamentally as a Trojan horse, sneaking ideas into painting, ideas like the ways that modernism and its leading practitioners have reached a true huis-clos. In the guise of mere empiricism: lists of services, daily essentials, diagrams and measurements, the signage in these paintings invites itself into the discourse of contemporary image making. But the works’ deceptive impartiality disguises its cunning. They seem to walk into the inner sanctum of iconography, calmly and determinedly, flashing an all-access pass. The paintings are full of phone numbers, addresses, discount prices, percentages, and acronyms. The paintings act in the same space and function as the advertising they depict. Presumably, at least for the near future, dialing one of the phone numbers could achieve connection. I experimented with 310-725-0862 from Unscheduled Departure (2023, acrylic on panel,18 × 24 in.; 45.7 × 61 cm): I was instantly connected to Airline Liquor. I asked if he had any specials and was eagerly informed that Absolut Citron in the 1.75-liter size was only $26.99.
Karmacoma (2024, acrylic on panel, 48 × 36 in.; 122 × 91.4 cm) suggests a relationship to religious iconography. A cruciform structure is crowned with the words “Tarzana Square” and covered in an elaborate list of businesses: a saint surrounded by his disciples. Flanked by an ancient palm tree and emblazoned by a desert sunset, the painting aspires to the iconographic standard of Titian’s Flight into Egypt (c. 1508), only the donkey is missing. The telephone pole, half hidden and emerging from the top of the signage, resembles a crucifix. Almost every human desire is addressed in the enterprise menu which dominates the painting. Tarzana Square is a garden of earthly delights in which every want is fulfilled by the plentitude of mom-and-pop entrepreneurialism.
Tarzana is a neighborhood within the greater expanse of Los Angeles, specifically the San Fernando Valley. In 1919, Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of the popular Tarzan novels, relocated to Los Angeles from Oak Park, Illinois. Burroughs purchased a large tract of land and established the Tarzana Ranch. In the 1930s, Burroughs subdivided and sold the land to a developer: thus was Tarzana born, perhaps the first thematized real estate development in the United States. In Burroughs’s novels (24 in all), Tarzan is the ape-name of John Clayton, Viscount Greystoke.
After Tarzan’s parents die tragically on a trip to Africa, Tarzan is adopted by a tribe of giant apes, the Mangani. His jungle upbringing among the Mangani gives him abilities far beyond those of ordinary humans. Here Rubsamen suggests a blurring of fact and fiction, consumer desires and advertising strategies, have comingled into a mega fantasy. Ironically, action training is offered, along with tanning and Tarzan-inspired food at the Greystoke Grill: all necessary services for a legitimate Lord of the Jungle.
In Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari described the late phases of capitalism as “radical deterritorialization.” Deterritorialization is the process where identity is eroded, eventually becoming indistinguishable from a myth, fantasy, or brand. Humans lose their individuality to become consumer tendencies and purchase histories. In our minds, it’s a cowboy or an astronaut or a British lord reared by apes who is taking a yoga class or getting a massage or having his hair styled. In a more traditional scenario, a family might pretend that they are the descendants of royalty, adding a nobiliary particle or tracing their ancestry back to some obscure aristocrat. After several generations, this mythmaking becomes reality. Deleuze and Guattari proposed that the process is now instantaneous. When you consume, you become what you fantasize. It’s simultaneous cosplay in which the exchange of commodities and services are fully implicated.
The alliterative concatenation Karmacoma sums up the essence of Deleuze and Guattari’s thesis. Karma is an ancient Indian concept that refers to an action or deed and its effect or consequences. It’s cause and effect, where physical and mental actions lead to consequences in this and future lives. A coma is a prolonged state of deep unconsciousness where a person is unable to respond to stimuli, including pain, sound, or touch. A person in a coma is unaware of the world around them and is impossible to wake.
At the lower right of Low Weekly Rates (2024, acrylic on panel, 36 × 48 in.; 91.4 × 122 cm), Rubsamen introduces a very different type of textual crust. He paints a sign with a quote from the beat poet, Jack Kerouac, “I have nothing to offer except my own confusion.” The quote is from On the Road (1957), except Rubsamen changed the original “had” to “have” transposing the quote into a first-person comment. Such signage, often called a marquee, is a customizable sign with movable letters. They are typically used by movie theaters to list their current films, churches to display the times of the masses, and businesses whose signs must be changed to follow fluctuations of price and availability. Rubsamen uses the form to send a personal message to the viewer, one that circumvents and sidetracks the normal sequence of the viewing process. It is a direct plea to a different type of critical thinking, one that asks the viewer to ignore initial conclusions and reconsider the artist’s motives based on a personal confession. Such confessions are rampant in the linguistic landscape. They include graffiti like “I love you,” or warnings such as “Keep out!” or pleas to good behavior like “People are sleeping!” Rubsamen speaks through Kerouac’s confession, he admits that his reasons for choosing the subject, the colors, and the style of the painting are completely mysterious.
Rubsamen, who has fashioned long practice of painting realistic palm trees, now paints an awkward graphic of two palms to illustrate the name of a motel: The Palm Tree Inn. Behind the 1950s motel signage lurk three real palms, painted as portraiture, describing a type of botanic individuality. Rubsamen has long used palm trees as surrogates for people in his paintings and the disparity between nature-as-commodity and the organic individuality of real, living beings is at the heart of this pictorial disquisition on the role of the artist in contemporary society. Another painting in the series, Inside Job (2024, acrylic on panel, 40 x 30 in.; 101.6 × 76.2 cm) uses the same device of the marquee in a very differant manner. Instead of a confession this time its a proclamation, “Language is a virus from outer space,” from the poet, Allan Ginsburg. The kind of proclamation one would expect from a ‘crack-pot’ conspiracy theorist or disgruntled postal worker. What Rubsamen is asking, however, is more subtle. If language is a virus then what is painting?
Curriculum Vitae (CV)
BIOGRAPHY
Born in Hollywood, USA
Lives and works in Los Angeles
EDUCATION
1981
MFA, U.C.L.A.
(Master of Fine Arts, University of California, Los Angeles)
AWARDS
1988
WESTAF NEA in Drawing
1992
Visiting Artist American Academy in Rome
SELECTED SOLO & DUO EXHIBITIONS
2025
Mom and Pop Capitalism, COSAR, Düsseldorf, DE
2024
The Petrified Forest, Annemarie Verna Galerie, Zürich, CH
2023
Glen Rubsamen & Rita McBride: Daily Echo Free Mirror. Mai 36 Galerie, Zürich, CH
Glen Rubsamen: Looking Backward, Elverhoj Museum of Art and History, Solvang, USA
2022
Glen Rubsamen & Rita McBride: Suite Matrimonial. Mai 36 Galerie, ZürichCH
Glen Rubsamen & Rita McBride: Lost – Missing. Riviera Parking, Santa Barbara, USA
2021
Glen Rubsamen & Jürgen Drescher: Mai 36 Galerie, Zürich, CH
2020
Détournement. (virtual) Mai 36 Galerie, Zürich, CH
2019
Environmental Catastrophes Top Ten and and other Abominations, COSAR HMT, Düsseldorf
2018
Clear From The Start, Mai 36, Zurich, CH
Chain Reaction, Stene Projects, Stockholm, SWE
2017
The Disguise Was Almost Perfect. Christopher Grimes Gallery, Los Angeles, USA
Gleaming and Inaccessible. Alfonso Artiaco, Naples, IT
2016
Visible from Space, Mai 36, Zurich, CH
2014
Clear Channel, COSAR HMT, Düsseldorf
2013
Companion Species, Stene projects, Stockholm
new works, Robert Miller Gallery, NY
Rhynchophorus ferrugineus, Osmos Address, New York
2012
Anabiosis, Alfonso Artiaco, Naples.
2011
Reality doesn’t need friends, Stene Projects, Stockholm.
Let’s die friends, Benveniste Contemporary, Madrid.
Some Kind of Nature, La Salle des Bains, Lyon.
2010
In the Place of Love, Galerie Annemarie Verna, Zürich
2009
La Nuit Américaine, COSAR HMT, Düsseldorf
2008
‘All The Time In The World’, Meyer Riegger, Karlsruhe
‘Fuga Nella Verita’, Alfonso Artiaco, Neapel
2007
Impossible Vegetation, COSAR, Düsseldorf
2006
Islands in the Stream, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden
Lazy Nova, Robert Miller Gallery, New York, USA
Pigeon Key and The Seven Mile Bridge, Annemarie Verna Galerie, Zürich, CH
und Mai 36 Galerie, Zürich, CH
2005
Pepe Cobo, Madrid
uminous Toxin, Meyer Riegger, Karlsruhe
2004
Valentina Bonomo, Rom
Galleria Alfonso Artiaco, Naples
2003
Galerie Michael Cosar, Düsseldorf
Mai 36, Zürich
Esso, New York
2002
Pepe Cobo Gallery, Sevilla
2000
Please let my affections lead me into danger, Galerie Bernd Klüser, München
Galerie Michael Cosar, Düsseldorf
1999
Susan Inglett Gallery, New York
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2025
Public Texts, A Californian Visual Language. AD&A Museum, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, ISA
Art & Nature: Inside Out. Villa Arconati, Milano, IT
2024
Nature’s Valley. COSAR, Düsseldorf, DE
The 100’th Show. Left Field Gallery, Los Osos, USA
2023
Group Text. (Curated by Beta Epochs), Left Field Gallery, Los Osos, USA
Coleccion Fundacion Valentin de Madariaga y Oya – M P, Fundacion Valentin de Madariaga MP, Seville, ES
2022
20M29, M29 Gallery, Cologne, DE
Summer Breeze. (virtual) Mai 36 Galerie, Zürich, DE
2021
Growing Pains: corporate overextension. The Sam Francis Gallery, CrossRoads, Santa Monica The Youngest Day. Carlier - Gebauer, Berlin, DE
Los Angeles (State of Mind). A cura di Luca Beatrice. Palazzo Cevallos Stigliano, Naples, IT
2020
NÄHE – FERNE, Elger Esser, Glen Rubsamen, Stefan Sehler, Cosar HMT, Düsseldorf, DE
Artists of the gallery – A succession of works and artists, Annemarie Verna Galerie, Zürich, CH
Queridos. Colección Jesús Reina, Centro de Iniciativas Culturales de la Universidad de Sevilla (Cicus), Seville, ES
2019
Just The Wall: w/ Rita McBride, Ava & Leao Crnkovic, Jack Slavin. Marvin Gardens, Los Angeles, USA
Flugblaetter. Cross Lane Projects, Cross Lane, Kendal, Cumbria, UK Figurations, Galería Miguel Marcos, Barcelona.
@ the beach, (virtual) Mai 36 Galerie, Zürich, CH
2018
Vlugschrift Flugblaetter. Pictura, Dordrecht, NL
Lesson Review II, Galeria Graça Brandão, Lisbon, PT
De Biënnale van de Schilderkunst. Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens / Roger Raveelmuseum / Museum van Deinze en de Leiestreek, Deurle, BE
Evolution. Galería Miguel Marcos, Barcelona
Tropical Precisionism, Guyana National Gallery of Art, Castellani House, Georgetown, Guyana Easy Rider. Il mito della motocicletta come arte. Reggia di Venaria Reale, Venaria Reale/Torino, IT
2017
Flugblaetter, Athens - Kassel - Venedig - Münster - Loitz. Künstler Gut Loitz e. V., Loitz, DE
Looks, Galería Miguel Marcos, Barcelona, ES
2016
30° Anniversary, Alfonso Artiaco, Naples
Affinities, Galería Miguel Marcos, Barcelona
2015
Eminent Domains (proper names). Robert Miller Gallery, New York
2014/15
Jäger und Sammler in der zeitgenössischen Kunst, Museum Morsbroich
2014
One million traces, Kunstverein Duisburg, Duisburg
2013
Lonelyfingers-Konversationsstücke, Abteiberg Museum, Mönchengladbach
2012
Take Me Somewhere Nice. Stene Projects, Stockholm
Eternal Summer (curated by Alexandre Melo), Paulo Darzé Galeria de Arte, Salvador da Bahia
Selections. Robert Miller Gallery, New York.
Schattenlicht, Annemarie Verna Galerie, Zürich
Nexus, Galería Miguel Marcos, Barcelona
2011
EUPHORISMOS, COSAR HMT, Düsseldorf
Localhost. Kunsthalle, Münster
Dystopia. CAPC, Bordeaux
2010
Traveling without moving, COSAR HMT, Düsseldorf
2007
Mae West and The Hyperbolic Paraboloid, Galerie Bernd Klüser, München
Idilio, Domus Artium, Salamanca, Spain
The fit, nüans, Düsseldorf
Early Retirement, Mai 36, Zürich
Less Roses, Sfier Semler, Beirut
2006
Idylle – Traum und Trugschluss, Phoenix Hallen, Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg
Clase Preferante, Galeriea Gracia Brandao, Porto
2005
Napoli presente, PAN; Neapel
Park, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden
100 Artists see God, ICA London
Der Kunst ihre Räume, Kunstverein Bonn
Temporary Import, Artforum Berlin
Landscapes, Galeria Gracia Brandao, Porto
2004
Strategies of Desire, Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel
Funkturm Fernbar at the Spaghetti Works, Y8, Hamburg
100 Artists See God, ICA, London
2003
There's no land but the land (up there is just a sea of possibilities), Meyer Riegger Galerie, Karlsruhe
Land and Sea, Alexander and Bonin Gallery, New York
Bandes a part: le Cinema dans l'art contemporain, Tresors Public, Mus. of Modern & Cont. Art, Strasbourg
Going A Journey, Charles H. Scott Gallery, Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design, Vancouver
2002
Crowne Plaza', FW Galerie, Cologne
We Slide Down The Surface Of Things, De Vleeshal, Middelburg
Taipei Biennial, Taiwan2001
Beyond the Mountains, Lyman Allen Museum of Art, New London, Connecticut
Bjorn Dressler, Masatomo Harada, Michael van Ofen, Glen Rubsamen, Galerie Michael Cosar, Düsseldorf
Atlantes, Galerie Pepe Cobo, Seville
2000
Beyond the Mountains, Newcomb Art Gallery, Tulane University,
New Orleans, Louisiana and Muskegon
Museum of Art, Muskegon, Minnesota
Please Let My Heart Lead Me Into Danger, Galerie Bernd Klüser, München
Damenwahl, Kunstverein München
1999
Two Doors-True Value, MAI 36 Galerie + Annemarie Verna Galerie, Zurich