Raquel Rabinovich

Y Gallery is pleased to present “Gateless Gates,“ the first solo exhibition of Raquel Rabinovich at the gallery. The exhibition includes paintings from her series Gateless Gates (1995-97) and drawings from her ongoing series River Library (2002 - present).

Gateless gate is a paradox used in Zen teachings to help students realize the nature of things. It is not about a gate, but about the mind being transformed by confronting the paradox of the non-existance of the gate. The Zen Master, monk Mumon, said:

"The Great Way has no gate, A thousand roads enter it.

When one passes through this gateless gate, He freely walks between heaven and earth."

Raquel Rabinovich’s work is also about transformative confrontation. When she makes art she doesn’t consciously know beforehand where she will arrive; she works until she experiences no gate or barrier, until there is no separation between inside and outside and she and her work become one. In the process of working – layer upon layer of lines, marks, paint, glass or stones – she seems to conceal what is not, and reveal what is. This is an essential aspect of her working process. If one looks deeply and spends time with her Gateless Gates paintings, one will discover the title embedded into the paint, which functions as a metaphor for what happens in the act of looking at a painting. The viewer has to go through a gateless gate to understand the paintings. What counts in the painting is embedded in the painting itself. The meaning is inherent in the painting. When one thinks about what that means one is already entering the painting itself. As Rabinovich herself has said, showing her recognition of the paradoxes her works engender, “I know that a painting is finished when the ground becomes groundless and the surface dissolves into that groundlessness.”

River Library is a series of drawings on handmade paper in which the artist uses mud from rivers all over the world as her medium. The layering of paper and mud onto pages parallels the formation of sediment in the depths of the rivers. Mud embodies the history of the earth and humankind – it contains life, death, and layers of accumulation. Mud, like the alphabet of a language yet to be deciphered, like a yet unwritten history of nature and culture, functions like a text that provides traces, a memory of our existence.

Rabinovich’s art has always been informed by an underlying fascination with the concealed aspects of reality. She is interested in what we cannot see and seems to be invisible. She is compelled by the process of how something emerges into view from concealment. Working across mediums, this is the essence of her artwork, now, and for the past 50 years.

Raquel Rabinovich (b. 1929 in Argentina) has lived and worked in the United States since 1967. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, most recently the 2011-12 Lee Krasner Award for Lifetime Achievement from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Other awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship in 1991, a National Endowment for the Arts US/France Fellowship in 1992, a Grant for Works on Paper by the Individual Artists' Program of the NY State Council on the Arts in 1995, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2001, and a second Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2006. In 2012 she was interviewed for inclusion in the Oral History Program of the Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art. She was the artist representing the United States in the 10th International Cuenca Biennial, Ecuador in 2009. Her work is included in many public and private collections including The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York City; Miami Art Museum, Miami; Museo de Arte Morderno, Buenos Aires, Argentina; World Bank Fine Art Collection, Washington, D.C.; Amateras Art Foundation, National Gallery of Art, Sofia, Bulgaria; Institute for Art and Urban Resources Artists Collection Fund, New York City; Museo de Arte Abstracto, Zacatecas, Mexico; Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogota, Colombia; Museo del Barrio, New York City; Hartwick Collee, Oneonta, NY among others. Solo shows include those at the Fundación Alon in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Trans Hudson Gallery in New York, NY; Lehigh University Art Galleries in Bethlehem, PA; The Americas Society in New York, NY; Bronx Museum of the Arts in NY; Galería Garcés Velásquez in Bogotá, Colombia, and Institute for Art and Urban Resources at P.S.1 in Long Island City, NY. Her work has been also in group exhibits at the Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NC; Miami Art Museum in FL; The Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery at The University of Texas at Austin; Museo de Arte Moderno de Cartagena in Colombia; Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil; Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires, Argentina; and in New York at El Museo del Barrio, Franklin Furnace, the Hudson River Museum, Parrish Art Museum, and The Brooklyn Museum.