Welcome to Spring as Musician Roman Rabinovich Displays his Artistry in Paint at TBT Gallery

Roman Rabinovich, renowned concert pianist, exhibits his paintings at TBT Gallery from May 19 to August 21 – opening reception is June 1. 

by Shelley Werner

(AJNews) – Roman Rabinovich is the artist for the new show at TBT Gallery at Temple B’nai Tikvah in Calgary. His work hits the high notes of painting techniques, and creates a song of many tones as you encounter the exhibit. The title of the show is “Memory Box”, as it deals with all kinds of memories and the world of the subconscious, the world of dreams and things that we can’t pinpoint and yet are ever present.

“I am an unusual case because I love doing many things in my creative life,” says Rabinovich. “I am mainly a pianist, a composer and musician but I have been painting my whole life. This is a side of me that is less serious than music. I’ve been painting since I was 8 on a regular basis. I have been obsessed with visual arts since I was a kid. I was constantly sketching at school and always studying the great artists, copying the old masters. That’s how I got into it: Rembrandt, Van Gogh. Picasso was my childhood obsession, and Matisse… this is a constant in my life.”

Gallery curator Jennifer Eiserman says, “We are truly blessed to be hosting an exhibition of paintings by Roman Rabinovich. This virtuosic concert pianist is also a talented painter. His colourful abstract works give expression to another facet of Roman’s interpretation of our world and our relationships.”

Having grown up in a musical household with both of his parents being piano teachers he grew up with music everywhere in the house and students coming in and records everywhere. Logically it was quite a natural development for him to continue in that line. Most of his work in his adult life was has been performing concerts all over the world but he is also a composer and interested in curating concerts. He co- directs 2 festivals: one of them is in Calgary called Chamberfest West, and he travels to perform as a concert pianist.

He is a classical pianist: anything from Renaissance music to compositions that are written yesterday, including his own music. He was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan which was part of the former Soviet Union and when he was a few years old his family emigrated to Israel. His formative years were in Israel from ages 8-17, then he moved to the US to study piano. He met his wife Diana who had a job in Calgary, now the concertmaster of the Calgary philharmonic. They divided their time between New York and Calgary until their daughter was born and he gave up his New York place during the pandemic.

“I am quite busy but I find time for the things I love,” says Rabinovich. “It’s an inner urge that has to be done somehow, so I find time. My style is quite diverse in range. I’m showing mainly abstract work at the Temple but I have lots of portrait work, quite realistic line drawings as well as abstract. I do play a lot of modern music, but music is an abstract language. The beauty of music is that it is something you can only express in sound. All the things that were written about music are useless because they don’t mean anything; you can’t explain music, you can only express it in the language of music.”

Music is an abstract language and yet it’s the most specific one because it can talk about things that words cannot, and in a way, painting is in a similar vein. You look at certain colours, forms and gestures and have all these associations: everyone will see different things and that’s the poetry of art.

“When I paint I listen to music sometimes,” he adds,  “but I don’t need to listen to music, because the music is always in my head. My days consist of 6-8 hours of practise on the piano. Sometimes I can’t get music out of my ears. It’s always there.”

In his art there’s no direct autobiographical work, although related to him but not to specific events in his life, rather to universal symbols that are there throughout art history. For example, the human figure is there, which goes back to ancient Greece, looking at the classical figures: the sense of beauty and proportion. In his paintings it is filtered through contemporary language, with his own language.

He would say his work is very instinctive, and the work is quite gestural. He loves to learn how these gestures start to talk to each other on the canvas and in that sense they are quite similar to musical gestures: there’s contrast and harmony and accents. He doesn’t like meticulous planning although he would like his paintings to look inevitable, but they have to have a sense of freedom so that they are not contained; a sense of breathing.

“I like art to be nuggets that explode in your mouth like chocolates that have intensity and a certain mood that you get right away from the first look. I would hope for people to enjoy the work, but I also am very curious to learn what people get from paintings. Why are they looking at them? What is it about art that we need in our lives? It would be presumptuous to tell people how to feel. That’s the last thing I want to have, a prescription about what they should see. I would like people to come to the paintings with an open mind and heart.”

He says that so much of our lives are starting to be so quick and we look at screens all the time, and 20 second videos that we are hoping will solve all our lives’ problems. We forget how to stop and look at art, to treat it not as just entertainment for escape but something that could raise questions and be a mirror for ourselves. That’s his hope: for people to have a moment with the paintings.

“I usually have an idea of what I want to explore but of course it ends up in a totally different place by the end, as most things in life are.”

TBT Gallery presents “Memory Box” from May 19-August 21, 2025; paintings by Roman Rabinovich. Opening Reception is Sunday June 1, 2025 from 4:00-6:00 pm Temple B’nai Tikvah, 900 47 Ave SW, Calgary. Monday to Thursday 9:00 am to 4:00 pm/ Friday 9:00 am to 2:00 pm or by appointment with the artist: Romanrabinovich.net/contact