Rubica von Streng/ Women Art

Since 2018, Berlin-based artist Rubica von Streng has been working on her PortLand cycle. Meanwhile, it consists of more than 150 works and is composed of four consecutive series: Towards PortLand, Limits of PortLand, Beyond PortLand and Seasons of PortLand. In the context of these works, however, PortLand is not a city name, but stands for the fusion of portrait and landscape painting. Both subjects enter into a liaison. In her paintings and works on paper, the artist correlates certainties and uncertainties of our current society. The results of her astute observations are multifaceted, mostly abstract visualizations that span wide panoramas of meaning and “capture the moods of the times”, as she explains.“Some of the PortLand paintings are reminiscent of the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, in which transience, imperfection and incompleteness are the essence of beauty, in contrast to the pursuit of perfection and materialism,” writes art historian Helen Adkins. In particular in the fourth part, ”Seasons of PortLand”, the artist’s works radiate a flowing, sometimes withered beauty full of contradictions. This is strongly visible in her most recent series of watercolors, entitled „The Seasons”.

Here is how this series came to be: As part of a collaboration with Berlin-based composer Alexander Eulgem, who recently wrote and produced music inspired by Rubica’s PortLand cycle, she painted a series of 20 watercolors on handmade paper as an artistic accompaniment to Alexander’s piece “The Seasons”. The 10 x 10 cm works, a selection of which is shown here, are available exclusively at two of the her partner galleries: Bode Galerie (Nuremberg/Frankfurt) and Galerie Tammen (Berlin).