GINO RUBERT: ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS
18 September - 10 October 2026
Overview
GINO RUBERT: ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS

In his second solo exhibition at Mobius, following Time to Set the Cage on Fire (2023), Gino Rubert gathers the artists who shaped his understanding of painting, among them Picasso, Duchamp, Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Miró. He sets them inside drawing academies and painters' studios, as though they had always shared the same room. Built from photographic collage, oil, acrylic, fabric and pins, each canvas is staged like a small theatre, where the history of painting is asked, disarmingly, to begin again.

 

PROGRAM

Visiting hours · until 10 October
Wednesday–Friday · 16:00–20:00
Saturday · 14:00–20:00

 

Guided tours · no booking required
Saturday, 3 October · 16:00–17:00
Saturday, 10 October · 16:00–17:00

 

White Night of the Galleries (NAG), 20th edition · special opening hours
Friday, 2 October · 16:00–22:00
Saturday, 3 October · 14:00–22:00 (guided tour at 16:00)
Sunday, 4 October · 14:00–20:00

Installation Views
Works
Press release
GINO RUBERT: ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS
18 September – 10 October 2026
 
Opening: Friday, 18 September, 6 – 9 PM
Mobius Gallery, Piața Amzei 13, Bucharest
 
Mobius is thrilled to present ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS, Gino Rubert's second solo exhibition with the gallery. Three years after TIME TO SET THE CAGE ON FIRE (2023) introduced him to the Romanian contemporary art scene, the Spanish artist returns with an entirely new body of work.
 
Bringing together recent mixed media paintings, the exhibition invites viewers into a witty, erudite and faintly uncanny universe, one in which the whole history of painting is summoned onto a single stage and asked, disarmingly, to begin again.
Rubert works in a dense and seductive technique: photographic collage fused with oil and acrylic, fabric, pins and found materials. Each canvas behaves less like a picture than like a scene, lit, cast and choreographed, a small and charged theatre. Art history, desire, memory and mortality return here as they always have in his work, held together by a magical realism of festive, affectionate intensity, in which love and death are celebrated in the same breath.
 
The exhibition takes its title from a group of paintings that stage improbable encounters between the artists who shaped Rubert's own understanding of painting. Picasso, Duchamp, Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Dalí, Miró, Tàpies and others convene with complete naturalness, as though they had always shared the same time and the same room. Rubert sets these scenes inside drawing academies and painters' studios, spaces consecrated to apprenticeship, and turns them into a parallel world where the familiar and the strange coexist without contradiction. What distinguishes his pantheon of modern masters is their curiosity, their appetite to keep starting over: they remain, in one way or another, absolute beginners.
 
What continues to set Gino Rubert apart is the extraordinary sense of closeness he establishes between the viewer and the worlds he unveils. His characters look back at us with an inquisitive, complicit attention, drawing everyone who enters the room into the fiction, spectator and author alike. Rubert orchestrates his canvases the way a masterful stage director orchestrates a company: every glance placed, every gesture timed, every entrance meant. As he opens the door onto this universe once more, he reminds us that painting, like life, is never truly finished, and that before art's masters and its myths, we all remain, gladly, absolute beginners.
 
Visiting after the opening: Wed–Fri 16:00–20:00 · Sat 14:00–20:00
Free entry. Piața Amzei 13, Bucharest.
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