Russian exile Lev Rukhin creates grand works of realism tinged with just enough peculiarity to suggest doubt. They are dreamlike—much of the imagery is suspended in a nimbus—and implies both memory and trickery. This device is quite intentional; the exhibition is titled Dreamscapes. 

Pressed together in scores of photographic tiles, these large-scale images are a peripatetic narrative echoing both his contemporary travels and his fragmented memories, of things firmly recollected and those hazily recalled. In Hero’s Journey, 72” x 96” (all works 2020), sits a Pittsburgh factory devoid of workers, a skeletal remnant of the former smoke belching Eastern powerhouse so fearsome that it had been referred to as “Hell with the lid taken off.” In the triptych, Homage to David Hockney, 72” x 144”, Rukhin’s silhouette can be seen illuminating a tall spiny yucca as waning sunlight rims the horizon. The artist is visible in many of the works as if assuming the role of tour guide and eager to reveal the singular beauty of the unvarnished.  His comparable yet much smaller Dunes places a similarly solitary tree in a much emptier landscape, isolated with an expectant or communicating human figure; the towering Brooklyn Chimney, 48” x 48”, becomes an obelisk worthy of homage as it watches over the sprawling boroughs. 

Lev Rukhin, HERO’S JOURNEY, 2020. Laminated archival dye-sublimation photographs, layered, cropped into circles, hand-mounted onto aluminum honeycomb substrate.

The gallery’s darkened rough-hewn floor lends a melancholy and contemplative aura to the works that are already doleful. Masonic Lodge, one of the smallest works in the exhibition, is a genuine haunter, suggestive not only of ghosts but advantages pressed, opportunities denied, and stratagems contrived. For an artist expelled from a homeland where subterfuge was a national obsession the ghosts of the past and the apprehension of the future are fraternal twins. Umbrella Man—part of his Los Angeles series of diverse figures—walks swiftly by in his shimmering suit, a wary eye ever cast behind him, his wide umbrella disguising his shadow.

Lev Rukhin: Dreamscapes

East 26 Projects

June 11-August 7