jEFFREY RUBINOFF SCULPTURE PARK

About jEFFREY RUBINOFF

Jeffrey Rubinoff was born in London, Ontario, in 1945. He studied fine art in the United States and completed his Masters of Fine Arts in 1969. On his return to Canada, he pursued an artistic career in both countries, including solo shows at the (Helen) Mazelow Gallery in Toronto, the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto, the Nathan Manilow Sculpture Park in Chicago, Queen’s Park in Toronto, and York University in Toronto, as well as being shown at Marlborough Gallery and Two Sculptors Gallery in New York.

In the early 1970s, Rubinoff moved to a 200-acre farm on Hornby Island in British Columbia, living and working on-site for the next four decades where he created the majority of his work. His sculptures range from the human to monumental in scale and are created exclusively from welded or cast, stainless and cor-ten steel. Rubinoff created his sculptures unassisted. His studio included a one-person steel foundry, which made it possible to cast the organic forms found in his later series. In addition to the sculpture, Rubinoff designed many landscape alterations to his property in order to better suit the exhibition of his sculpture.

During the 1990s, Rubinoff’s work was shown in exhibitions with David Smith, Anthony Caro, Alexander Calder, Nancy Graves, Mark di Suvero, Tony Smith, George Rickey, Beverly Pepper, and Robert Murray.

Regarding the dominant art of his time, Rubinoff stated: “For my generation of artists, culture was defined by marketing. The art market defined originality as novelty. I realized that to make original art with artistic depth I would have to return to the lineage of the ancestors—the history of art by artists. So began a dialogue with the ancestors, artist to artist via the work itself.”

– Information provided from rubinoffsculpturepark.org

The Park

First opened to the public in 2008, the 200 hectare Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park is home to a collection of over a hundred of Jeffrey Rubinoff’s sculptures. The Park is situated on a farm purchased by Rubinoff in 1973 for the purpose of the creation and storage of his work. Rubinoff repurposed its barn, originally built in 1889, into a fabrication and casting studio, and worked there from 1980 until his death in 2017.

After growing terminally frustrated with the vacuousness of the art market, Rubinoff started siting his sculpture at the property permanently in 1998, bolting some of them down to granite slabs. This was when the idea of the farm becoming a permanent display of his life’s work began to take shape, though Rubinoff had already been working with landscaping contractor John Kirk to reshape the land to create display mounds and berms, plant over 1000 trees as well as dig drainage streams and 35 ponds. The Park was finally established with the registration of the Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park Society in 2005.

In late 2006, Rubinoff began working with Karun Koernig on a programme of activities, beginning with an annual symposium, and planning for regular concerts and openings. In 2007 work began on the interpretive centre. It was designed and built by Hornby Island’s Blue Sky design, who completed the project in 2008. Since then the scope of activities has increased dramatically from summer openings, tours and concerts, to university courses and high school groups, photography classes, and the annual Forum.