Tabitha RUB | Fuzzel Tov

With Fuzzel Tov, Tabitha Rub presents a predominantly new body of paintings, complemented by several earlier works dating back to 2023. The title, a playful variation of “mazel tov”, announces an exhibition that celebrates togetherness, lightness, and the possibility of joy. Conceived as a fitting summer exhibition, Fuzzel Tov offers a moment of relief and hope in a present often shaped by antagonism, anxiety, and doom.

Rub’s bright, warm paintings depict fuzzy, faceless creatures whose gestures express acts of care, intimacy, friendship, solidarity, and cooperation. They gather, embrace one another, appear in portraits, and negotiate challenging situations without losing their sense of humour or openness. Their lack of faces makes them at once universal and uncanny: stripped of fixed expressions, they invite viewers to project their own emotions and experiences onto them.

The figures inhabit an alternative universe assembled from a broad and deliberately accessible range of references, including fairy tales, popular culture, cinema, music, and art history. Echoes of Adam and Eve, Rapunzel, Lady and the Tramp, Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine, Titanic, and Britney Spears coexist without hierarchy. Rub’s gently cheeky, childlike humour challenges the assumption that serious art must address only serious subjects.

Her paintings are built through numerous layers of egg tempera, a demanding and comparatively uncommon medium in contemporary painting. Because the colours do not blend directly on the canvas, each form and gesture must be conceived with clarity from the outset. Repeated marks, contrasting tones, and carefully constructed shadows create the impression of fur, while the contrast between soft bodies and hard surfaces gives the scenes both tactile richness and visual tension. Through this meticulous process, Rub creates a world that feels strange, tender, and reassuring—a hopeful vision of collective life.