Lydia rubio biography

Lydia Rubio is a.
Lydia Rubio is a multidisciplinary visual artist.
Lydia Rubio is a Cuban-American artist, born in Havana.

•

A talk with artist Lydia Rubio on The Traveling Artist,* her featured artist project at Center for Book Arts, an exhibit featuring artistic documentation of Rubio’s travel narratives across linguistic and geographic landscapes. The works record the artist’s experiences across a variation of calligraphic, drawing and poetic compositions. This exhibition includes multiple series of works, including The Genius Loci Book, Journal of a Trip to the Island, and Travel Journals.

The artist will be introduced by Aurora de Armendi, director of our Visual Arts Program. The talk will be followed by a bilingual Q&A and a wine and cheese reception where the attendees will be able to chat informally with the artist.

This art event is part of the CreateNYC Language Access program and will be held in English.

CENTER FOR BOOK ARTS
28 West 27th Street, NYC

RSVP at: https://www.eventbrite.com/LydiaRubio/featured-artist-talk

*On exhibit since October 3
Image above, courtesy of Patrick Farrell

Lydia Rubio (Havana, 1946) attended the University of Florida and Universit

•

LYDIA RUBIO: THE ARTIST IN ARCADIA

More than forty years of development and commitment, to be exact. At age 75, Lydia has made a name for herself in the international art world with multidisciplinary works, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, artist books, and large-scale public art. She has shown in numerous galleries, held solo museum exhibitions at the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale (1995) and Bronx Museum of the Arts (1985), and participated in group and traveling exhibits. In 2008, she was commissioned by the Raleigh-Durham International Airport in North Carolina to create The Gate of the Earth, a colossal 45-foot high spiral sculpture, in stainless steel.

Now, her first major retrospective is underway in two parts at Elevated Matter, a new gallery on Warren Street. The first part, entitled PROHIBIDO (Forbidden), took place in July. It featured 13 paintings and an oversized travel journal, completed from 1992 to 2014. The second will feature abstract paintings. While this pairing may seem atypical at first, the concept of “blending” (different cultures, dis

•

My work is deeply rooted in a knowledge of form and geometry, and influenced by –music, literature, and Latin American culture. I am an avid reader of art history, theory and philosophy. I have traveled and visited international art museum collections to further inform my approach to art.

Painting is at the core of my practice. Primarily based on a conceptual system, not a fixed style. I produce works in series, mostly technically elaborate oils on wood. Works are organized in sequences of -paintings, drawings, journals- built around codes of maps, letters, and numbers, like chapters in a narrative. The works on paper are in ink, charcoal and watercolors. The subjects I select connect to places and moments in my life.

I see my work as a balancing act between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the North American and the Latin cultures, expressing lived experiences of contrasts, displacement, rupture, and fragmentation. Since the eighties, I have completed many modular paintings with changing installations and user participation, giving the works a life beyond the studio.

In the