Minneapolis-based artist Madison Elyse Rubenstein creates abstract paintings using gouache, india ink, oil paint, oil pastel, and mixed media. Through layered color, texture, and intuitive mark-making, their work examines embodiment, identity, and the possibilities of imagination.

• Madison creates layered abstract paintings that use color, texture, and fragmented forms to examine embodiment, identity, and imagination.
• By trusting intuition and material experimentation, they have developed a visual language that gives form to experiences that are often difficult to express with words.
• Through ArtLifting, Madison has built a sustainable full-time artistic practice, bringing their work into workplaces, innovation hubs, and healthcare environments across the country.

Layered washes of gouache, india ink, oil paint, and textured mixed-media elements come together in Madison Elyse Rubenstein's large-scale abstract paintings, where fragmented figures and saturated color examine the body as a site of memory, emotion, and transformation. Based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, they create compositions where saturated color and expressive mark-making invite viewers into spaces that feel suspended between tension and release.

Influenced by Abject Art, Madison has developed a visual language that questions conventional ideas of what bodies should look or feel like. Their paintings often begin with graphite or colored-pencil sketches before evolving through translucent washes, textured surfaces, and vibrant layers of paint applied with brushes, palette knives, carving tools, and piping bags.

For Madison, making art is both a process of discovery and an act of trusting curiosity. 

Through abstraction and material experimentation, they create paintings that encourage viewers to question familiar ideas about the body while making space for imagination and new possibilities.

“When I look back on my art later, I can see how following these impulses acts as a conduit between my conscious self and unconscious self, paving the road to knowing myself more deeply.”

What makes your creative process uniquely yours?

My abstract paintings are the emotional, physical, and spiritual reflections of my life-long experience living in a chronically-ill and disabled body. My work embraces an intimate and abstracted humanism, where figurative abstractions and bodily forms are sometimes suspended, ungrounded in voids of color and emptiness, safely tethered in midair. Figures become fragmented, simplified, or are reduced to strokes of color, weighty and radiant.

In my process, I will get hyper-focused on a theme, an image, or a material and not understand why in the moment, but I have learned to trust and follow this curiosity. When I look back on my art later, I can see how following these impulses acts as a conduit between my conscious self and unconscious self, paving the road to knowing myself more deeply.

What life experiences most deeply influence your work?

I became chronically ill when I was about 7 years old, and I remember feeling even then that art was a way for me to express what I was experiencing. It helped me articulate personal experiences that I could not find the words for. It became a language for my internal landscape — and that continues to this day.

Living with life-long disabilities means that I have received constant messaging from the world that I don’t belong, that I should be different, more easily digestible, less complex. Those “shoulds” don’t exist in artmaking, and it is within my creative practice that I find freedom from societal expectations.

How has sharing your work through ArtLifting changed your art or your life?

My relationship with ArtLifting has played a major role in helping me foster enough financial stability to allow me the freedom and joy of being a full-time artist. Being a full-time artist helps me survive because my disabilities limit my ability to work a traditional job. I am able to set my own hours and accommodate myself as needed. This has led me to being able to afford stable housing after many years of housing insecurity, in addition to expensive and life-saving out-of-pocket medical costs.

Because I am disabled, queer, and neurodivergent, my creative life provides me with a deep sense of belonging and joy that I struggle to find in the rest of the world. It has helped me connect to a sense of purpose. Having the freedom to regularly make art improves my overall quality of life because making art is how I find wellness in a disabled body. 

What do you hope stays with someone after they experience your work?

My desire is for my work to inspire people’s own creative impulses because I believe that creativity is necessary for imagining new and better futures for all of humanity. Challenging traditional structures, trusting our creative subconscious, and imagining different possibilities are all important parts in imagining a just and liberated world.

I hope my art supports people in envisioning a future where all people are safe to be themselves, disabled people have their needs met, and where we are considered equal and important members of society.

As Madison's practice has grown, so has the reach of their work. Through ArtLifting, their paintings have been installed in Bank of America financial centers, Amazon and WeWork locations across the country, Intuit's MTV22 campus, Harvard Innovation Labs, BlueRock Therapeutics headquarters, and the headquarters of a leading New England healthcare company.

These installations extend Madison's practice beyond the studio, creating opportunities for people to encounter their work in the course of everyday life.

Looking ahead, Madison remains committed to following curiosity wherever it leads, continuing to build a practice rooted in experimentation, embodiment, and the belief that imagination can help us envision new possibilities.

Follow Madison's creative journey on Instagram.