Jeffrey Rubinoff

Jeffrey Rubinoff passed away on January 24, 2017, at age 71, near his home on Hornby Island in British Columbia, Canada. Rubinoff was a former boyfriend of comedienne Gilda Radner

In 2015 Vid Simoniti, who recently completed his doctoral thesis on ‘The Epistemic Value in Contemporary Art’ at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University, was selected to be first Rubinoff Fellow.

In 2014, Churchill College, Cambridge University jointly established the Jeffrey Rubinoff Fellowship in Art as a Source of Knowledge with sculptor Jeffrey Rubinoff. The Fellowship supports early career postdoctoral researchers working in the field of Art as a Source of Knowledge, with a focus on the visual arts.

As 2010 forum speaker Dr. Lawrence Badash, Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, stated:

In May 2008, the farm on which Rubinoff has lived and worked for over four decades was inaugurated as the Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park (JRSP). It is the largest sculpture park devoted to the work of an artist in Canada.

During the 1990s, Rubinoff focused on historical group exhibitions, including David Smith, Anthony Caro, Alexander Calder, Nancy Graves, Mark di Suvero, Tony Smith, George Rickey, Beverly Pepper, and Robert Murray.

In the early 1970s, Rubinoff moved to a 200-acre (81 ha) farm on Hornby Island in British Columbia, living and working on-site for the next four decades to create the majority of his work. His works ranged from human to monumental scale, and are created exclusively from welded or cast, stainless and CORTEN steel. Rubinoff created all his sculptures unassisted, and his studio included a one-man steel foundry, which makes it possible to cast the organic forms found in the later series. In addition to the sculpture, Rubinoff, with the help of John Kirk, designed many landscape alterations that have reshaped the farm and original wilderness landscape to suit the exhibition of his sculpture, making it into a large conceptual piece in itself. In Series 1 of his sculpture, Rubinoff consciously echoed David Smith; Series 2 drew upon Anthony Caro and Richard Serra; in Series 3-5, he found his own voice within modernist sculpture, using balance and counterpoint, and positive and negative space to evoke the counterpoint in the late string quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven.

Rubinoff, a London, Ontario artist, studied fine art in the United States and completed his Master of Fine Arts in 1969. Subsequently he returned to Canada to pursue his artistic career which included one man shows at the Mazelow Gallery in Toronto, the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto, the Nathan Manilow Sculpture Park in Chicago (he was the first Canadian to be given a major solo show there in 1996), Queen's Park in Toronto, York University in Toronto, and the Two Sculptors Gallery in New York which he co-founded with Don Bonham.

Jeffrey Rubinoff (October 23, 1945 – January 24, 2017) was a Canadian sculptor and founder of the Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park on Hornby Island where he lived and worked since 1973. He produced over 100 sculptures in the last four decades.