Searching for Peace
Yvette Drury Dubinsky

GALLERY I

Yvette Drury Dubinsky, *Anguish* (detail), 2022, Monotype (photolithographs, relief prints, monotypes, ink, pencil, cyanotype, collage) on handmade, Japanese, and Arches papers, 48 x 117 inches.

May 28 - June 26, 2022

Opening reception: Thursday, June 2 from 6-8pm

A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce Searching for Peace, an exhibition of new work in painting and printmaking by mixed media artist Yvette Drury Dubinsky. Meditating on the passage of time, Searching for Peace is evidence of the inevitable interplay between an artist’s solitary workings in the studio and those of a turmoiled outside world. This is Dubinsky’s fourth solo exhibition in New York City.

Many works in the exhibition—including several paintings on handmade paper and repurposed medicine and art supply boxes—are small and portable, made between 2021 and 2022 at a point during the pandemic when travel to visit family became possible once again. Other works memorialize the rapid changes and prolonged grief of the last several years, layering words that became newly charged—sourdough and shelter—with the names of those who succumbed to the virus in the early stages of the pandemic in 2020.

While serious in subject matter, Dubinsky’s work is also intuitive and playful—a metaphor for a multifaceted life. The medicine boxes, for example, while chosen for their idiosyncratic shapes when deconstructed and made supports for painting, are also a byproduct of the increased use of over-the-counter medications by an aging artist. On these informal surfaces, Dubinsky layers wildly colorful and sometimes repellant mixes of gesso, ink, pencil, crayon, and gouache, employing an experimental blend of painting and printmaking techniques.

The largest and newest work in this exhibition, a monotype titled Anguish (2022), was already begun when Ukraine was invaded by Russia in February 2022, leaving much of the world stunned, horrified, and immobilized. As the violence in Eastern Europe escalated, Dubinsky found herself assembling the work in reaction to the conflict and thinking of her mother.

A century ago as a child, Dubinsky’s mother fled war just north of what is now Ukraine, trapped for a time in the basement of an occupied house. Dubinsky recalls that her mother never fully processed the exodus or talked about her childhood, spending her later life traumatized by the violence and uprooting she had experienced. Today, working in her studio and following the news, Dubinsky feels, as she did in her youth, both captivated by and powerless to ease the trauma she witnessed firsthand.

Yvette Drury Dubinsky, based in Truro, MA; New York, NY; and St. Louis, MO, earned her M.F.A. from the Sam Fox School at Washington University, where she has also twice received distinguished alumni awards.

She has had recent solo exhibitions at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Provincetown, MA; Farm Projects, Wellfleet, MA; and Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, MO. In 2021, her work was included in group shows at the Carter Burden Gallery, New York, NY; MIT’s Broad Institute, Cambridge, MA; Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, MO; and at the Mary Heaton Vorse House, Provincetown, MA. This spring, her work traveled to Japan and will go to Poland in the summer alongside the work of other A.I.R. artists.

Dubinsky’s work is in the collections of the St. Louis Art Museum, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, the Nevada Museum of Art Center for Art and the Environment, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Margaret Harwell Art Museum, and has been part of the Art in Embassies Program of the United States Department of State. Dubinsky has been the recipient of a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France. www.yddstudio.com.

View the Press Release here.

View Yvette Drury Dubinsky’s page here.

Press:

Billy Anania, “Your Concise New York Art Guide for June 2022”, Hyperallergic, May 31, 2022.

Public Program

Conversation with Yvette Drury Dubinsky, Buzz Spector and Amanda Verbeck.