The floating fruit in Adrienne Rubenstein’s Fruit Business

By SIVAN LAVIE, June 12, 2026

Adrienne Rubenstein’s show Fruit Business at Broadway Gallery is a tribute to her family’s fruit business that her grandfather started in the 1930s, which involved her parents and other family members who worked together to sell, store, transport, distribute and market the fruit. In this spirit, this review shall examine the fruity economy of her work, as well as other undercurrents in her paintings.

Adrianne Rubenstein, Circle, 2026 Adrianne Rubenstein Circle, 2026 oil on canvas 56 x 47 inchesAdrianne Rubenstein, Floating Fruit, 2026 oil on canvas 60 x 72 inches

The piece Floating Fruit (2026) is the key by which to read the show. Her sincere love for fruit glistens here and shifts our perspective to celebrate the healthful nature of fruit. In the piece, a bowl is tossed, its contents jumping mid-air in happy whitish bluish greenish tones. Strawberries, an orange, an apple, grapes, are all imbued with deep colors, and as you look at them you might, like me, find yourself running across the street to Gourmet Garage to buy a flaming scarlet plum and an ecstatically marigold nectarine, to devour juicily outside the gallery before returning to look at Rubenstein's works with a fresh mouth. 

Adrianne Rubenstein Table With Flowers, 2025 oil on canvas 30 x 22 inches

Strawberries dot Table with Flowers (2026) like hearts dot ‘i’s in a teenage girl’s diary. They are found stamped joyfully in the foreground and again more abstractly on the top left on the canvas. The adoption of strawberry as elementary mark in the painting offers a bold, contemporary evolution to the yumminess of Matisse’s brightly colored modernist fruit, by the strawberry’s flight in mid air. The obsessive patterning is at times as part of the picture, and at other times a graphic element in abstracted, post internet flat space, which offers a Kawaii, KidPix-like appropration that is only possibly achieved by the postmodern artist. 

Screenshot from Kidpix, a 1989 children’s art computer software

Her strawberry designs are sometimes abbreviated as almost featureless red blobs, like in Starry Night (2025), where a tiny strawberry flies across the night sky. At other times, like in Floating Fruit (2026), strawberries are large and detailed, with multicolored seeds adorning their surface. Rubenstein’s graphic design elements extend beyond strawberries to poppies, tulips, grapes, butterflies and stars. These decorative doodles also introduce a diaristic approach to artmaking reminiscent of Fernanda Laguna’s obsessive drawings from The Moleskine Series (2019), in which she depicts stars, hearts and flowers on notebook pages to achieve a girlish and dreamy intimacy.  

Adrianne Rubenstein, Circle, 2026 Adrianne Rubenstein Circle, 2026 oil on canvas 56 x 47 inches 

Fauvist and impressionst elements resurface in Rubenstein’s pieces, like Derain-esque color-changing tree branches in Rainbow Branches (2026), and shivering stacked colorful lines in Circle (2026) and Plastic Winds (2026) that are not unlike Monet’s. Alongside these elements exist a whistling contemporary underbelly, seen most clearly in Oranges (2026) and Floating Fruit (2026). The bottoms of both canvases bubble with a chaotic mass of freehand, expressive shapes, loose circles, lines and blobs that bring a fresh freedom to the more regimented portions of these paintings. 

It is this more raw expressiveness that brings a feeling of metamorphic pregnancy, foreshadows something that is yet to come. A blobbish caterpillar apparition on Table with Flowers (2026) recurs as holes pierced in the fruit of Circle (2026). Though they may be intended as flowers, the Eric Carle semblance is noteworthy, which meets us a final time in Floating Fruit (2026) as the chrysalis-like preverse-grid fruit bowl brings with it a curiosity of what will next emerge in Rubenstein’s work, as summer approaches. 

Adrianne Rubenstein Grapes and Flowers, 2025 oil on canvas 30 x 22 inches

Adrianne Rubenstein

Fruit Business

June 4 - July 17

Broadway Gallery 

375 Broadway, New York, NY 10013