Nancy Rubins

I realized that this stuff has been around a long time, and it’s passed through this odd transition. Before it was in the earth, it was floating as a molecule in outer space—it was part of somebody’s star, or part of somebody’s exploding planet. 
—Nancy Rubins

Gagosian is pleased to present Fluid Space, an exhibition of recent sculptures and drawings by Nancy Rubins.

Since the late 1970s, Rubins has transformed industrial and found objects—everything from television sets and airplane parts to canoes and carousel animals—into engineered abstractions following rhizomatic patterns. Her first public project, Big Bil-Bored (1980) was commissioned for the Cermak Plaza shopping center in Berwyn, Illinois, and she has continued to work on a large scale ever since; Big Pleasure Point, a structure composed of more than sixty small water vessels, was installed outside New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in 2006.

In Fluid Space (2019–), the series from which the exhibition takes its title, Rubins uses the same cast metal animals that appeared in her Diversifolia series (2016–18), now sliced into fragments that expose their seams and undersides, calling further attention to the shape-shifting potential of the metal itself. These quasi-organic structures bloom from tables and stools, recalling works such as Table & Airplane Parts (1990–2011), which incorporate architectural foundations from which disparate elements emerge.