Glen Rubsamen (born 1957) is a visual artist and writer, primarily working with painting and photography. Rubsamen splits his time between Los Angeles, California and Düsseldorf, Germany. Rubsamen is married to artist,

Rita McBride Rita McBride (born 1960) is an American artist and sculptor. She is based in Los Angeles and Düsseldorf. Alongside her artistic practice, McBride is a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and served as its director until 2017. McBride is ...

Early life

Glen Rubsamen was born in Hollywood, California in 1957 to Gisela Roth/Rubsamen and

Walter H. Rubsamen Walter Howard Rubsamen (July 21, 1911 – June 19, 1973) was an American musicologist specializing in Italian music of the Renaissance music, Renaissance, Ballad opera, Ballad Opera, as well as music and politics. He was professor of musicology at ...

. He is the younger of two children. His sister Valerie Rubsamen was a professor of politics at Swarthmore College (retired) and author of numerous books and articles on media and the state in France. His father, Walter H. Rubsamen, was a professor of musicology at the

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

, known primarily for his work on the literary sources of secular music in Italy in the fifteenth century and the history and politics of

ballad opera The ballad opera is a genre of English stage entertainment that originated in the early 18th century, and continued to develop over the following century and later. Like the earlier '' comédie en vaudeville'' and the later ''Singspiel'', its disti ...

, he traveled extensively for research with grants from various American institutions. His Mother Gisela Roth/Rubsamen is an art historian specializing in the Italian Baroque. Rubsamen earned his BA and MFA from the

in 1978 and 1981 respectively.

Books

Glen Rubsamen is the author and co-editor, with Rita McBride, of a variety of experimental artist publications, including ''Futureways'' a group of short stories by different authors describing an art exhibition in the future, ''Those Useless Trees'' a book about the relationship of trees to the new global urbanism, ''Rhynchophorus ferruginous'' an investigation of a parasite that has caused the death of millions of primarily ornamental palm trees in the Near East and the Mediterranean and has had a profound effect on the cultural aesthetics of tourism, ''Take All The Time You Need'' a combination painting monograph and a quinquagenary agenda for organizing the next fifty years.

Painting and photography

Glen Rubsamen's paintings and photographs are characterized by a documentary interest in compiling, like collectibles, situations in nature of great dramatic intensity in the romantic tradition, such as sunrises and sunsets, exuberant vegetation, or images of the apocalypse. Through brusque combinations of different perspectives and violent foreshortening of the objects and trees, Rubsamen shows us an uninhabited and almost aggressive world, an assaulted nature that makes us think of the devastating after-effects of a meteorological or technological catastrophe. These characteristics, combined with the absence of human presence, the tendency towards monochrome and the lack of spatio-temporal references create an atmosphere charged with austere quietude and spirituality. Rubsamen is the painter of a nature where the organic appears in artificial images.

Galleries

References

1957 births American male painters Living people Painters from California UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture alumni University of California, Los Angeles alumni {{US-painter-1950s-stub