Ruben Einsmann

Ruben Einsmann (b. 1994, Hamburg) lives and works in Leipzig, with a second studio in Kerven, France. He took a diploma in fine art at the HBK Braunschweig in 2022, under Norbert Bisky and Thomas Virnich, and works across painting, ceramics and installation. His paintings put Romanesque frescoes, medieval manuscripts and early printing next to the pop and subculture imagery of the 1990s and 2000s, keeping the flatness of the medieval source, where figures and architecture are arranged by hierarchy rather than perspective. He works on coarse cotton and linen, starting from the back of the canvas so the image arrives mirror inverted, and building up hydrophobic and hydrophilic layers so the pigment bleeds through and resurfaces where he cannot fully predict. The result carries a patina that looks weathered rather than applied, and holds no trace of the tools that made it.

Solo exhibitions include Fragments from a Future Past at Galerie Brutal, Hannover (2023) and a solo show in Chile in 2025, with group exhibitions at Council+ Gallery in Berlin, at V1 Gallery in Copenhagen, at the A.R.M. Foundation in Dubai and in Leipzig and Stuttgart. His work has been presented at SWAB Barcelona and Feria Capital in Argentina.

Einsmann has been represented by Plan X since 2024, when the gallery presented his work at Art Dubai and his first solo exhibition in Italy, Eternal Echoes, at Plan X Capri, returning to Art Dubai in 2025 and taking part in Marea at Plan X Capri in 2026.