The Brooklyn Rail

Heather Bause Rubinstein’s Out of the Woods, the artist’s first solo show in New York, includes several large oil on canvas abstracted landscapes executed over the last two years. The series betrays a progression in the artist’s handling of the naturalist leitmotif, with the landscape growing more elemental and assured. In the earliest works, muddied verdant and plum stains pile into a central force that is often overtaken by a new, hurried tangerine or ocean-blue array. The landscape is less apparent in these works, which more readily hew toward stroke-based collisions of uneven sawtooth undulations and jagged contours. Snaking lime-green lines only slightly suggest fauna’s arched stem, just as the flurry of titan in Saint Chroma (2024) broaches the faint possibility of a sunset flush plain. Naturalism is here relegated to the edges of connotation, as canopy-contained eddies outspread and unravel as frequently as they coalesce.

Rubinstein furthers her suggestion of panoramic scenery in works like Garden state (2025) and Disappearance of Blue (2025), where the vanishing blue skyline makes itself apparent by cutting against the wooded vista below. Rubinstein’s march towards distilled scenery culminates in Between seasons (2025), where copses and groves come into view. The sides of the towering thicket massings are darkened, some left leafless and others darted with morsels of wrist-shot jade. A few wooded enclaves lumber into one another, pooling into dark rents. The whisking scamper of canopies is here pronounced against a faintly limned background where one can make out blushes of flaxen skylight. Along the lower edge of the canvas, undergrowth thickets overtake one another, signaling where shrubs deform into peripatetic strokes. This is compounded by edging and discharging errant robin’s egg blue streaks that vertically bleed like raindrops stemming the chestnut brown hedges. In diluting the scene’s clarity, the celeste runoff chromatically interrupts Rubinstein’s picture plane. Thus, the scene is by no means a perspicuous landscape and all the better off for it, aptly balancing natural imagery with its very negation.

Curiously, Rubinstein deploys the term “inscape” to describe her abstracting approach to the landscape genre. The English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins first employed this term in his 1858 notes on Parmenides and the portmanteau was, in the late 1930s, integrated within an art-historical context by Roberto Matta. For Matta, the “inscape” designated the idea of the landscape as discovered within the self, with the artist transmogrifying mental states into figurative representations. Rubinstein takes herself to be working in this tradition, evidenced by the exhibition’s press release, which observes that “[h]ere the woods are not simply trees but monumental ‘inscapes’ that hold the tensions of the physical and inner worlds.” Indeed, there are a number of points of confluence between Rubinstein’s flaming terrains and Matta’s volcanic imagery—particularly those inspired by the latter’s 1941 travels to Mexico with Robert Motherwell. In terms of palette, both Rubinstein and the Matta of the late 1930s/early 1940s cede the natural landscape to disparate blazing elements. But Rubinstein is also far more painterly in her pictorial intercessions. For instance, Matta, in The Earth is a Man (1942), posits a looming sun that obscures and disintegrates the moldering ruby planet below. Rubinstein’s Saint Chroma (2024), Autumn Maples (2024), and The Disappearance of Blue pour orange effluvium in brushed orange rivers that both overtake and are overtaken by the surrounding clouded tufts of paint. Ebony blue and purple-brown locks clump atop rather than buoy upon Saint Chroma’s surface. Here the surface texture consists of built-up laminate planes that hardly interrelate, unlike Matta’s “inscapes,” where congealed colorful mountains and flames are unified into a single plane. Once Rubinstein dissolves her autonomized levels into a self-same layer, which she accomplishes with Garden state and Between seasons, we find the rivulets successfully interacting with the pictured ecosystem.

Alongside Matta, Rubinstein is also working within the tradition of what Robert Rosenblum, in 1961, deemed the “abstract sublime” in his eponymous essay. Admittedly, to argue that Rubinstein’s work consists in the overwhelming of rationality via magnitude or a confrontation with mortality, as has characterized the sublime since Pseudo-Longinus and Edmund Burke, would be to misinterpret her far more temperate airy landscapes. But Rosenblum’s broader point is that the American abstraction of Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Barnett Newman had, in its displacing the heritage of Cubism and De Stijl’s geometric abstraction, authorized the nineteenth-century Romantic tradition’s penchant for glowing voids as a “private myth”—one now directed (albeit, perhaps unwittingly) by “a new kind of space created by flattened, spreading expanses of light, color and place.” A number of contemporary artists, including Nicholas Campbell and Liza Lacroix, have recently further homed in on emanations from unseen and veiled light sources, creating abstractions that represent the searing crevices that transpire along naturalistic boundaries. But, compared to Rubinstein, these artists have hewed closer to naturalist illusionism than they have the landscape proper. Rubinstein’s most effective works resuscitate and make pellucid the vestiges of landscape painting that have lingered in American panoramic abstraction’s latent history.