I’ve always been interested in portraying some kind of fantasy, then showing that it’s completely constructed. There are always dark messages hidden behind beauty, and the act of sculpting is about listening to that inner voice that warns you about something lurking beneath the surface.
—Rachel Feinstein
Gagosian is pleased to present Secrets, an exhibition of new work by Rachel Feinstein. This is Feinstein’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.
In richly detailed sculptures and multipart installations, Feinstein considers the sumptuous materiality of historical European luxury, updating its refined surfaces and edges with a gritty and approximate excess. Borrowing freely from Baroque and Rococo sculpture, religious iconography, Romantic landscapes, and mainstream media, she explores issues of taste and desire, synthesizing visual and societal opposites such as romance and pornography, elegance and kitsch, the marvelous and the utterly banal.
Secrets consists of new sculptures, wallpaper, and paintings in which Feinstein cannibalizes notions of beauty, belief, and spectacle to reveal perfection as a form of burlesque. The Secrets is a series of eight large-scale sculptures that reflects on the Victoria’s Secret phenomenon, with its trademark “Angels” in their jaw-dropping lingerie costumes—dressed as butterflies, firebirds, baby dolls, snow queens, and more—strutting their stuff at the brand’s annual fashion extravaganza that is broadcast to millions of ogling fans worldwide. Feinstein’s figures have been scaled up in hard foam from small clay maquettes, then individual hues applied piece by piece in hand-colored epoxy resins.
