Now Showing | Ernestine Ruben
New York Times review

Natalie Rinn, The New York Times

William Holman Gallery Blazing a Hot Trail of ART
Arte Fuse review

Oscar Laluyan, Arte Fuse

"Ernestine Ruben depicts outdoor scenes as pulsating with life. Her sumptuous platinum prints of fragments of Rodin's sculptures - muscular backs, torsos, arms, and heads seen at Paris's Rodin Museum - seem to transform the stone into rippling flesh. An almost blinding light irradiates the surface, beautifully emphasizing the passion and mystery of these works."

LAURIE ATTIAS, ARTnews

"...Ruben has created a remarkable body of work, astonishing in its breadth of subject matter, technique and emotional range ...her work is marked by an interest in structure, in finding the truth beneath layers of appearance, and in finding connections that link humans to the world around them."
"...Ruben both celebrates and advances the history of the photographic image, all the while remaining passionately commited to visual pleasure and her delight in the beauty in the world around her."
"...There is a fascination with the power yet frailty of the human body and the seeming conflict between surfaces and substance make a striking link"

JAMES CHRISTEN STEWARD
Director, University of Michigan Museum of Art

"Photographer Ernestine Ruben sees all of life in the human body. It's her subject as an artist, her transport to everything from landscape to architecture, from ancient ruins to the sculpture of Rodin."

JOY HAKANSON COLBY, Detroit News Art Critic

"Ruben crops tightly and seems to embrace the bodies with her camera, creating geometric forms from torsos, necks, hands and buttocks, all with emphasis on the imperfect, sensuous texture of skin."

KERI GUTEN COHEN, Detroit Free Press

"Her camera angles are extreme, even improbable. She invites shadows that obliterate familiar landmarks of the body and then combines odd portions of two bodies: the collarbones and Adam's apples of two men loom like monumental and somehow incorrect torsos. Such formal complexity creates not merely abstract anatomies but new bodies, new beings, aspects of the human domain that not even photographers have seen before."

VICKI GOLDBERG

"Certain words recur in any conversation with this photographer: birth and transformation,....(her work) evolves continuously and resists categorization. Moving through the progression of her work, three dimensional reality becomes two-dimensional imagery, flat prints become dematerialized illusions in space, people become sculptures, sculptures become photographs, photographs become paper, become tables, become backdrops, become books."

A.D. COLEMAN

"What began a hundred years ago in the sculptures of Auguste Rodin is renewed for us today in the images of Ernestine Ruben. The union of these artists exemplifies the essential nature of artistic creation, for since the beginning, creation has been born of physical action and spiritual energy...A dynamic new force takes over, as Ernestine Ruben engulfs the sculptures with her lens and gives them new life...Somehow she makes seen what is unseen by literally depicting the aura, the life force, and the spirit which emanate from Rodin's works."

SIMON HARTER

"For Ernestine Ruben nature has a soul, and a man and woman are not without resemblance to a tree, a rock or a river. For her, endlessly working on contacts and interactions, human beings and nature intersect and even perhaps interpenetrate; forever bound together only some madness could temporarily separate them. In opposition to the ephemeral synchronized fusion of beings, the fusion of man and nature is marked by the stability of their interdependance in which art must still find its niche so that the demons flee towards other horizons."

PIERRE BORHAN

Ruben is a poet.  Form, light, texture, the figure are her tools.  Sensual enlightenment is her subject."

MARSHA MIRO, Detroit Free Press