Viewed at a distance, the rows of books on a bookshelf translate as an abstract composition or otherwise saturated color fields. Up close, texture and individual titles pop and invite the viewer to linger and explore. A bookshelf is not a novel, yet it holds countless tales, ideas, and imagined worlds.
This Is Not a Novel, 2026 by Roberta Fineberg (RF) is a meditation on literature, memory, and the book as an object. RF’s art begins with photography, which she transforms through oil paint and diamond dust. The work blurs the distinction between photography and painting, while the addition of diamond dust creates a tactile surface and luminosity.
For the mixed media work RF entertains the relationship between objects and the stories they tell. In this case, the result is a contemporary still life and an artist’s celebration of the intrinsic value of books and reading.
This is not a Novel, 2026
by Roberta Fineberg
Mixed media: photography, oil on canvas, diamond dust
Signed, dated, and titled (on verso)
20 x 20in. Framed.
Provenance: RF Studio
***
Artist's Bio:
Roberta Fineberg (RF) is a New York-based visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores serendipity, experimentation, and the evolution of ideas through color, material, and process. Working across photography, drawing, installation, video, and abstraction, she investigates themes of impermanence, play, memory, and transformation. Embracing chance as an essential creative force, her work invites viewers to reconsider the relationships between observation, experience, and the physical world.
Fineberg’s exhibitions include Women of Spirit at Zurcher Gallery, New York (2025); Gallery128, New York (2025); Collecting: An Art Fair at Westbeth Gallery, New York (2024); Sojourner Gallery, New York (2022); Phyllis Harriman Gallery (2020, 2022); CADAF Online Art Fair (2020); Gallery122, New York (2018); Curate NY (2013); and Photos, Femmes, Féminisme at Paris Photo (2010). Her work is held in public and private collections, including portraits of women writers at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand in Paris. In 2022, her photograph Double Helix was featured in Sotheby’s Contemporary Discoveries preview exhibition in New York.
Recent commissions include twenty pigment prints from her Roman God(dess) series for the Orient Express Hotel in Rome (2025). Her work Union, from the Butterfly Series, was selected for Butterfly: Exploring the World of Lepidoptera (Phaidon, 2025), and in 2026 three works from the series were released as curated digital editions on Sedition.
Fineberg began her career in Paris in the 1980s as an editorial photographer and freelance writer. Her photographs have appeared in international publications including Le Monde, Paris Match, Ms., Jeune Afrique, among others. She is also the author of City Riders: A Story of Riding and Friendship (Howell/Macmillan, 1997).