Heather Gaudio Fine Art is pleased to present “Top of the Hill: New Paintings,” a solo exhibition featuring new work by Brian Rutenberg. The show will open with a reception for the artist on September 15th, 4-6:30pm and will run through October 27th.
This new body of work by Rutenberg is entitled Top of the Hill, after a Frank Vincent DuMond painting. For Rutenberg, Connecticut has played a significant, subtle role in his education and development as an artist. As a student of art history, he has been guided by the Tonalism of John Henry Twachtman, J. Alden Weir and other Cos Cob painters, as well as the Grassy Hill landscapes of Old Lyme painter DuMond. Rutenberg has lived and worked in New York City for over thirty years and during that time has taken pleasure in enjoying the four seasons in the Nutmeg State. Such was the starting point of the work created for this exhibition: these are big paintings of small things -- of alder and willow, or iris and hot drops of rain.
For Rutenberg, the title Top of the Hill conjures an image of standing in one place peering into another. His landscape paintings refer to being in one season looking ahead into another, as in longing for September in May. “I always go back to the wisdom of Winnie the Pooh, who said his favorite thing isn’t getting honey, but that moment when he might get honey. Herein lays the source of all art: unfulfilled longing. It has taken me forty-two years of painting to see what was there all along, that something can only come to life when we can’t have it.” In his decades-long career Rutenberg has had over two hundred exhibitions in this country and abroad. His work is in numerous museum and private collections.
This exhibition is made possible with the generous cooperation of Forum Gallery in New York.