KEN DUBIN
Memoir: Life and Living, 1975 / 2017, Acrylic, graphite, on paper and digital print, 11" x 14", 2017

Ken Dubin was born in Chicago and moved to Iowa in 2009. He earned an MFA from the University of Illinois and has received fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Michael Karolyi Memorial Foundation, Ox-Bow, the Grinnell Artist residency, and Prairie Center of the Arts.

Dubin's paintings have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the United States and abroad, such as the Chicago Cultural Center; the Wustum Museum of Fine Art in Wisconsin; David Adamson Gallery in Washington, DC; Shirley Fetterman Gallery and Triplex Gallery in New York; Perry-Nicole Gallery in Memphis, Tennessee; ICON Gallery, Teeple Hansen Gallery, and the Dubuque Museum of Art in Iowa; the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; and the Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institutek (German American Institute) in Regensburg, Germany.

The left section of this assemblage is a digital print of an 8 x 10 black & white photo printed in 1975 and then painted over with acrylic paint. The right section is a small painting on paper made in 2017.

About the Emergence / Burial / . . . Series, 1979–Present

My ongoing body of work, THE EMERGENCE / BURIAL / . . . SERIES: 1979–Present, is informed by origin, growth, change, transcendence, and rebirth. I explore the unfolding of time—past, present, future, and the cycles of life that exist within; the idea that everything comes from somewhere and is growing and changing into something else. White as the predominant color field is a metaphor for the potential of all possibility. The surface activity ranges from a quiet to erupting energy, suggesting degrees of growth, transformation, and potential of what is to come. There is much layering of the paint, which both releases and restricts the abstract activity and suggests the process of origin, development, disintegration, and it's return. Although the content is confined by the physical edges of the canvas I make the paintings appear to transcend this restriction, as if they have no beginning or end, to suggest the boundlessness of time and space. Although each piece is considered a finished work, viewed together they form a single entity, ultimately about life and living.

Ken Dubin's website