Born and raised in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and currently based in New York, NY, Reuben Gordon applies virtuosically skillful finesse to paintings that feature scenes of urban life evocatively specific to, and imbued with, the spirit and ethos of their setting: overpass graffiti tags, billboards, and street signs, alongside stolen episodes of the day-to-day that capture the meaning of being young in the city: bar and apartment parties, sports games, dizzy car rides, and sneaky kisses. Gordon’s painterly range in oil, pastel, and charcoal limns processes expressionistic and mathematical, photographic and gestural. Yet Gordon’s work also displays the visual discipline and underpinning of abstract painting—the correspondence of color, form, brushstroke, and the “sense of the resistant plane surface as a likeness of the visual continuum”, as Clement Greenberg wrote in 1949. The result is a poetic interplay between the literal flatness of the painting and the varied perspectival depths of the scene depicted.

Reuben Gordon currently lives and works in New York City. He received an MFA from Hunter College in 2026, studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, and received a BA in Studio Art from Bard College in 2018. He later studied at the University of Pennsylvania. Recent exhibitions include To The Bite, Hunter College, New York (2026); GAME! Basketball and Contemporary Art, Great Park Gallery, Irvine (2026); Inertia, 81 Leonard Gallery, New York (2025); Napkins, UMARELL, New York (2025); Skull Island, Sweet Lorraine Gallery, New York (2025); Night/Life, 205 Hudson, New York (2025); Dirty Work, Hunter MFA, New York (2024); You Already Know, Baert Gallery, Los Angeles (2023); Seoul, Charles Addams Gallery, University of Pennsylvania (2023); New Paintings, Baert Gallery, Los Angeles (2021); UNTITLED ART: Miami Beach, Baert Gallery, Miami (2020). Collections include the Frederick R Weisman Foundation, Los Angeles; Friends Seminary, New York; and private collections internationally.