artist/ Rubinstein

France

Nicolas Rubinstein (b. 1964) attended the École Nationale Supérieure de Géologie in Nancy and, while still studying engineering, he produced his first visual works and formed an alternative rock group that gave a number of concerts between 1986 and 1992, enjoying relative success before releasing an LP in 1989 on the anarchist label VISA. With his past devoted to the joys of the underground and his future turned towards contemporary art, Nicolas Rubinstein – who has now thrown himself wholeheartedly into sculpture – distils a personal body of work based around representations of animals and the skeleton. Bone, chosen as a symbol of life and memory, became the recurring subject of his work, and the basis of a plastic vocabulary that he used at Le Lieu Unique in Nantes in 2010 and at the Fiac. With his anatomical deconstructions of the Mickey Mouse icon, Nicolas Rubinstein holds the poster for the group exhibition “C’est la vie! Vanities from Caravaggio to Damien Hirst” at the Musée Maillol in 2010. My work is very close to a scientific approach, with the working hypothesis being the search for a message to be deciphered, and my ‘mission’ – and I must confess that I consider it a mission – being to uncover and understand this message! Even if, for the moment, I don’t understand much of it…”.