A significant artistic homecoming arrives at the Eilat Artists’ Gallery on December 4 with Face to Face, a rare exhibition featuring siblings Gideon (Gidi) Rubin and Michal Rubin. As grandchildren of the iconic Israeli painter Reuven Rubin, the internationally working artists carry a profound legacy.
Both trained in New York and London, they now stand side by side, offering two distinct yet deeply complementary perspectives on the human form and showcasing the powerful interplay between their family history and their individual contemporary art.
Curated by Céline Avrahami, the exhibition is part of an ongoing municipal initiative to strengthen Eilat’s contemporary art profile. Previous shows in the series have featured artists such as Angelika Sher, Hila Ben Ari, Zadok Ben David, Ori Gersht, and Lea Nikel. This new chapter focuses on an intimate artistic dialogue within a single family.
The Rubin siblings’ works do not answer each other so much as resonate. Gidi’s paintings offer a contemplative quiet; Michal’s photographs introduce grounded immediacy. Both are anchored in close observation, one through the erasure of the face, the other through its attentive recording.
Together, they shape a nuanced conversation about how we see, how we remember, and how personal histories become part of a broader cultural story.
Exhibition works
In this exhibition, siblings who have spent much of their careers abroad return to stand, quite literally, face to face. Their shared lineage is present but never overstated. The focus rests on the works themselves and on the human questions they raise.
For Eilat, and for visitors passing through the gallery this winter, Face to Face offers a thoughtful, finely tuned encounter with two artists whose practices are distinct, intertwined, and quietly resonant.
Although their artistic languages differ, both siblings acknowledge their grandfather, Reuven Rubin, as a shaping force in their visual consciousness. As one of Israel’s foundational modern painters, his work and presence shaped the cultural environment in which they grew up, surrounding them with stories and paintings and fostering a lifelong closeness to art.
What emerges in Face to Face is not homage but a continuation of inquiry. Their works echo a question central to their grandfather’s art: what it means to look closely at another human being and how that act shapes understanding.
About the artists
Born in 1973 and based in London, Gidi Rubin has built an international reputation for paintings that explore presence through absence. His faceless figures, distilled from photographic sources, are defined by posture rather than identity. Their quiet gestures and muted palette create intimacy shaped not by recognition but by suggestion.
Rubin has exhibited widely, including at the Freud Museum in London, the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, and major galleries and foundations across Europe, Asia, and the United States. His work often prompts viewers to fill in what is missing, turning looking into an act of participation.
Michal Rubin (b. 1977), also London-based, works in photography. Her images, often of family, close friends, and domestic interiors, focus on the intimate and immediate. They have appeared in international publications and been shown in galleries and museums in Israel and abroad.
Where Gidi’s work is withheld, Michal’s offers a patient attentiveness to everyday life. Her gaze lingers on gestures, moods, and relationships, revealing layers of meaning within seemingly simple moments. Together, their works trace a spectrum of visibility, what is hidden, what is revealed, and what lies in between.
Curator Céline Avrahami has followed the siblings’ careers since her years in London, and the exhibition reflects her longstanding interest in the relationship between body, gesture, and human presence. By bringing the two artists together, she creates a space where their differing approaches can be read in relation to each other. Positioning painting and photography side by side highlights the tension between anonymity and immediacy, distance and closeness.
A documentary film created especially for the exhibition adds another layer, featuring interviews with the artists shot in London. Directed by Avrahami with British filmmaker Mark James, it broadens the exhibition’s scope and situates the works within the artists’ own reflections on practice, memory, and family history.
Face to Face is part of a broader effort by the Eilat Municipality, the Eilat Tourism Corporation, and the Association of Museums and ICOM Israel to cultivate a contemporary art scene in the city. Since the initiative began in 2023, Eilat has hosted exhibitions featuring national and international artists, integrating them into the region's cultural life.
As with previous exhibitions, Face to Face will be accompanied by an educational program involving local schools. Hundreds of students will participate in a creative project responding to the exhibition’s central themes, with their works displayed in the gallery’s outdoor space.