Rachel Feinstein

I was not concerned with gender, desire, high and low culture, theater, or taste in these works. For me it is about life and death. 
—Rachel Feinstein

Gagosian is pleased to present Mirror, an exhibition of new works by Rachel Feinstein. This is her first exhibition with the gallery in the United Kingdom, and her first in London since 2007.

Comprising paintings on mirror and a large stained-wood sculpture titled Metal Storm (2021), the exhibition is animated by Feinstein’s fascination with the human figure and historical and cultural narratives. The works in Mirror refer to German art from the turn of the sixteenth century, a period of transition from the Gothic to the Northern Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. Shifting between two- and three-dimensional modes of representation, this new work uses historical and religious symbolism to embody worldwide anxieties of the unknown during the time of COVID.

Articulated in oil on mirrored glass, Feinstein’s paintings in Mirror reference sixteenth-century sculptural altarpieces carved in unpainted limewood by Tilman Riemenschneider and a polychrome figure by Gregor Erhart, another German sculptor of the era. Technically virtuosic, these artists united Gothic elegance with humanistic expression to represent religious figures including Christ, the apostles, saints, and Mary Magdalene as symbols of compassion, suffering, and love.