Clear Seeing Place: The Encapsulating Canvases of Brian Rutenberg

Featuring twenty-four paintings and five works on paper, this exhibition examines the career of New York-based artist Brian Rutenberg. These works, produced between 1993 and 2016, are on temporary loan to the Saginaw Art Museum from Forum Gallery in New York, with a few selections from the Jerald Melberg Gallery in Charlotte, North Carolina.

As indicated by the title, Clear Seeing Place serves to illustrate the ideas and themes presented in Rutenberg’s recently published autobiography, Clear Seeing Place: Studio Visits. A self-professed Southern landscape painter, Rutenberg explores the notions of lucidity and authenticity of place, as well as the spatial relationships of one’s surroundings through abstraction. His compositions, constructed as portals which at once compress and accelerate time and space, enable the viewer to interact with the creator through pure intention. Rejecting the idea of his paintings as precious luxuries, Rutenberg embraces the act of painting itself as communicative grandiosity.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website