Glen Rubsamen born in Los Angeles, CA in 1957, lives and works between Los Angeles and Düsseldorf, Germany.

Rubsamen is virtually obsessed with painting sunrises and sunsets. The paintings portray a battle between organic elements and manmade ones, but this conflict seems to rage between completely artificial forces. The vegetation looks to be from a sci-fi horror movie and the man-made elements are all the creations of a mega-communications giant like T-mobile or Vodafone. They are creatures, plants fighting robots, all painted in contraluce against a luminous but sickly sky. Rubsamen contravenes the existing treaties of the landscape genre, applying the strict rules of atmospheric classicism in exactly the wrong ways; using shadow to create depth and luminosity for flatness. The trees and vines in the paintings seem almost human and the cell phone towers and lampposts have the feeling of being organic, they act as vegetation. Everything in these paintings is somehow opposite, but the results are strangely plausible. Rubsamen has created a world where dawn mixes with dusk while mythic characters struggle in the foreground like titans, but they are merely ancient palm trees and upstart microwave antennas. His hyperrealistic painting is reminiscent of contre-jour photography where the foreground motifs appear as black silhouettes. There is hardly any other motif linked as strongly with the notion of desire than sunrises and sunsets they reflect the emotions of our own existential insignificance faced with the expansiveness of the world. In Rubsamen’s paintings the sun’s rising and setting is a metaphor for birth and death, the cycle of life.