Bill Rabinovitch in Bucharest

A Palazzo Vimana exhibition hosted by Gallery Studio 76, Bucharest

Framework
The forthcoming presentation of Bill Rabinovitch at Studio 76 marks the inaugural gesture of Palazzo Vimana, an itinerant and speculative curatorial platform conceived as both structure and proposition. Bucharest becomes its first site of manifestation, and Rabinovitch its first interlocutor from the United States.

Dates
Exhibition: July 1, 2026 - August 12, 2026

Curatorial Statement
There is a building in lower Manhattan that looks, from certain angles, like it has always been there. 63 Crosby Street, SoHo, New York. Since 1973, Bill Rabinovitch has lived and worked in the same apartment on the same street in what became one of the most mythologized art districts of the twentieth century. He did not arrive by accident. Marcia Tucker — the dissident curator who would go on to found the New Museum after being fired from the Whitney — convinced him to come. He came, and he stayed. He stayed through the galleries, through the rents, through the boutiques, through the tourists, through the decades. He stayed as a kind of quiet refusal: an artist who chose depth over mobility, density over exposure, the weight of a lived place over the lightness of a career.

Rabinovitch's life is an argument — about what it means to make art outside institutional permission, about what survives when the market moves on, about the relationship between a body and the space it inhabits.

Rabinovitch studied engineering, flew jet planes, worked with NASA, before abandoning the logic of systems for the logic of the image. He passed through the discipline of built space before arriving at the canvas. He understood painting not as decoration but as construction: a structure that bears weight, that holds something up, that can — under the right pressure — reveal what it was built to conceal.

What Palazzo Vimana brings to Gallery Studio 76 in September 2026 is not a retrospective and not a monument. It is a selection of paintings and documentary photographs, video — the two registers in which Rabinovitch has always worked simultaneously — placed inside a space that understands, from its own architectural DNA, what it means to make art in a building that was built for something else.

The exhibition proposes a dialogue between artist and space, foregrounding an approach to exhibition-making that privileges process over fixed statements. Studio 76, as an alternate space within Bucharest’s evolving art ecology, provides a context attuned to experimentation and emergence. Within this framework, Palazzo Vimana enters as a nomadic counterpart—importing a structure that is at once foreign and porous, capable of absorbing local conditions while retaining its conceptual integrity.

Rabinovitch’s works, in this context, can be understood as instruments: devices that tune the perceptual and cognitive registers of the viewer. They invite a mode of attention that is durational and investigative, encouraging navigation through layered spatial cues, symbolic residues, and material ambiguities. The encounter becomes less about consumption and more about orientation within a shifting field.

Importantly, this exhibition also stages a first: the introduction of Palazzo Vimana as a platform, and Rabinovitch as its first exhibited artist from the United States. This gesture is not framed as a simple act of importation, but as the opening of a circuit—a bidirectional exchange that situates Bucharest within a broader network of artistic production.

In September 2026, Gallery Studio 76 becomes, temporarily, Palazzo Vimana. Not as a transformation of identity, but as an overlay—a superimposed architecture of ideas. Within it, Rabinovitch’s work operates as both anchor and catalyst, setting into motion a dialogue that extends beyond the exhibition itself.

What is proposed here is not just a show, but a condition: one in which space, artist, and curatorial intent converge to produce a moment of heightened awareness. A moment in which the viewer is invited to step inside a structure that is at once conceptual and real—and to consider what it means to inhabit it.

The Curator

Ioan Șerban

Ioan Șerban was born in Sibiu in 1955. He emigrated to the United States in 1983, where he spent two decades at the center of one of the most charged periods in American art.

His entry into the art world came through the theatre — he wrote and directed experimental plays in New York drawing on the manifestos of Tristan Tzara, Max Ernst, and Hans Arp, staging works that treated Dadaism, Surrealism, and Abstraction not as historical movements but as live problems. It was a natural step from the stage to the gallery: both are rooms in which something is asked of you.

Through the 1980s and 1990s he worked with Vorpal Gallery in SoHo — situated directly across from the galleries of Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend, and beside Mary Boone — during the years when Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Julian Schnabel were making the street feel like the future of painting. He went on to collaborate with Foster Goldstrom Gallery, and with dealers Patrice Landau and Elga Wimmer, advising on the openings of Elga Wimmer Gallery and Stendhal Gallery, and working in curatorial roles across numerous exhibitions. Vorpal Gallery during those years was also the platform that introduced the world to Yozo Hamaguchi — the Japanese printmaker who redefined mezzotint — and deepened the visibility of M.C. Escher.

Among the more remarkable chapters of those years: he was entrusted by Jerry Brewster of Brewster Gallery to accompany Leonora Carrington during her visits to New York — one of the founding figures of Surrealism, and the companion of Max Ernst.