I'll do a drawing, and then drawings of the drawing, and keep getting away from the source as many times over as I can so I don't just replicate. I'm not interested in trying to copy the object itself. And then sometimes I'll cut up the drawing and hot glue-gun the whole thing into a three-dimensional paper drawing, and either that will become a sculpture on its own—because that weird, flattened, planed-wood sculpture will be really beautiful—or I'll use that as a skeleton, and then I'll add stuff on top.
—Rachel Feinstein
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present a site-specific installation by Rachel Feinstein. This is her first exhibition in Rome.
Feinstein's multi-part installations, which contain autonomous sculptures and paintings, reveal her singular flair for synthesizing a myriad of cultural fascinations—religion, myth, beauty, mortality, decadence—into vignettes of the marvelous. Oil paintings on mirrored surfaces, flat propped sculptures reminiscent of stage dressings, and abstracted reworkings of classical sculpture confront persistent issues of artistic representation such as theatricality and illusionism. By layering quotations from diverse artistic, architectural, cultural, and stylistic sources—from religious iconography to Baroque sculpture, Romantic landscapes, and popular cartoons—art and history are charged with a burlesque sensibility.
In this latest of her compelling fantasies, Feinstein has covered the interior gallery walls with a panoramic wallpaper of an impressionistic Rome. Sourcing and collaging diverse artistic visions of the city from different historical periods, she first made a large oil painting on mirror depicting this heterotopia of her own invention, where an eighteenth century piazza scene buzzing with life jostles against ancient ruins and an Arcadian landscape. This was then printed on mirrored wallpaper, to which five diamond-shaped glass mirrors, painted with faces, are fixed, merging cunningly with the background panorama while catching and reflecting the passing viewer's gaze.
