YVETTE DRURY DUBINSKY

RECONSTRUCT

November 7 - December 20, 2025 | View photos of the Opening Reception on the gallery’s blog | The gallery will be closed for the Thanksgiving Holiday on November 26, 27, 28 and 29th.

ARTIST TALK with Yvette Drury Dubinsky, Heather Bennett, Chris Kahler and Patricia Olynyk at Bruno David Gallery is on Saturday, December 13 at 4 pm. Read more about the Artist Talk

Bruno David Gallery is pleased to announce RECONSTRUCT, an exhibition of a new mixed media installation and smaller works by Artist Yvette Drury Dubinsky. Reconstruct builds on Dubinsky’s 2024 New York exhibition constructDEconstruct. She continues to explore the tenuousness of shelter, stability, and home via repurposed containers and boxes but here she works to create new structures with them.

Born of the interplay between solitary work in her studio, the push-pull of her personal life, and the ongoing turmoil of the outside world, Dubinsky’s new work builds on her earlier work and combines maps and silhouetted figures with abstract shapes created by flattened and printed boxes. Using painting, printmaking, alternative photography, and collage she incorporates earlier, never shown or salvaged work and frames.

In her last St. Louis exhibition at Bruno David Gallery, Dubinsky repurposed small cardboard boxes used to store medicines and art supplies. She then flattened, printed, or painted on them, and transformed them into discrete two-dimensional objects. She later, in her most recent exhibition (2024 in New York) pushed the boxes further, using them as printing plates, layering their shapes on paper to create complex monotypes. The resulting prints were brought together with the original boxes, which had been printed, painted, and collaged using oil-based ink, gesso, colored inks, photo processes, acrylic, pencil, and marker to create large-scale, three-dimensional installations, as well as smaller works. One of those installations is reconstructed in this exhibition.  The boxes in earlier work gestured toward their original use, as containers for supplies—medical and artistic—that sustain an individual life. But here, as they alchemize into sprawling assemblages and collages, they begin to resemble buildings and intersecting realities. The arrangement of the boxes and prints in the large installation Deconstruct (2024) is deliberately chaotic. Intermingling with hand-welded metal shapes, the boxes appear to randomly come off the wall, reflecting a landscape that might have been bombed or destroyed by natural disasters. Also printed on the boxes are maps from places such as Aleppo, Kiev, and Gaza, as well as silhouetted figures drawn from newspaper articles and photographs of Dubinsky’s own family. In all the work these figures travel, as if on a journey to someplace new. Maps of sanctuary cities appear too. In Deconstruct, the travelers survey the rubble, perhaps forced to flee homes now destroyed..

The boxes, once literal containers for supplies, become metaphors for human refuge. Their forms reference current social problems: lack of affordable housing, the destruction of homes during wartime, and lack of shelter for migrants. In the current exhibition, the reuse of containers seeks to reverse the accumulation of waste in our landfills, and by extension its effect on global warming. A wide variety of support structures sustain us as humans: the houses we live in, the families we nurture, and the communities in which we stake claim. But these support structures are also vulnerable to illness and injury, or war and climate change. DEconstruct asks, “What do we do when our systems of support fail?”  Reconstruct is a hopeful response to that question: We use what we have and continue to move on, or make art.

Dubinsky has shown her work around the US and in Europe and Japan. Her art is in the collection of The Saint Louis Art Museum, The New York Public Library, The National Art Museum of Tokyo, The Beineke Library at Yale University, The Provincetown Art Association and Museum, The Nevada Art Museum, The Margaret Harwell Museum and The Federal Reserve Bank. Her large collaged alternative process photographs have been a part of the Art in Embassies Program of the United States State Department.  She has had a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France.

Drury Dubinsky, based in St. Louis, MO, Truro, MA and New York, NY earned her MFA from the Sam Fox School at Washington University in St. Louis and an AB and MA from the School of Arts and Sciences there as well. This is Dubinsky’s eighth solo exhibition at Bruno David Gallery. In conjunction with the exhibition, Bruno David Gallery will publish a catalogue of the artist’s work featuring an in-depth exhibition history and bibliography.