84. Bond Street

Having studied at three different art schools, a 24-year-old artist moves to New York where he begins to spend two to three hours a day writing out numbers on graph paper, starting at 1 and aiming for infinity. When ideas for art works come to him he incorporates them into his counting process, either by inserting a drawing into his columns of numbers or by signing his paintings and sculpture not with his name but with whatever number he has reached when he completes them. Nine years after arriving in the city he has amassed some 10,000 sheets of 8.5-by-11-inch paper with numbers from 1 to 2,346,502. This nearly 3-foot high stack of number-filled sheets becomes the centerpiece of his first solo exhibition.

(Jonathan Borofsky)

Raphael Rubinstein is the New York-based author of The Miraculous (Paper Monument, 2014) and A Geniza (Granary Books, 2015). Excerpts from his recently completed book Libraries of Sand about the Jewish-Egyptian writer Edmond Jabès have appeared in Bomb, The Fortnightly Review and 3:AM Magazine. In January 2023, Bloomsbury Academic will publish a collection of his writing titled Negative Work: The Turn to Provisionality in Contemporary Art. Since 2008 he has been Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Houston School of Art.