The future of contemporary art has passed through Artissima. Confirming the fair’s ability to capture and convey the most innovative trends in advance, our Artissima The Forerunner column presents a selection of artists who took part in past editions of Artissima and are now showing work in some of the world’s most prestigious contemporary art institutions. Every week for the whole month of September, on our blog and our social network profiles, we’ll point out international exhibitions – solo or group shows, now and in the fall – featuring works by outstanding artists who have built or boosted their careers at Artissima, year after year. Are you ready to explore with us?
Today for Artissima The Forerunner we present: RACHEL ROSE
► on view at Fondation d’Entreprise Galeries Lafayette – La Fayette Anticipations, with show Rachel Rose, open until 13 September 2020.
Find out more: Rachel Rose – La Fayette Anticipations
In her video work, Rachel Rose experiments with a wide range of filmic techniques, from video collages to, most recently, narrative filmmaking. Irrespective of these different approaches, the artist has developed a consistent method of projection and installation to immerse and affect the viewer, thus transforming the whole Fondation Lafayette Anticipations into a physical and psychological experience.
Rachel Rose, exhibition view (c) Andrea Rossetti / Lafayette Anticipations – Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris, 2020
► participant at Artissima 2014, in the PRESENT FUTURE section, with the gallery High Art, Paris, and winner of the prize illy Present Future, promoted by Artissima and illycaffè
Rachel Rose, A Minute Ago, 2014, HD Video, Dimensions variable, Courtesy High Art, Paris
Learn more about the artist in the words of JAMIE STEVENS, curator of the PRESENT FUTURE section of Artissima in 2014:
“Rachel Rose’s ongoing video project, commissioned for the Taipei Biennial 2014, is shot primarily in the Glass House, Connecticut, the preserved residence of seminal US architect Philip Johnson. This pavilion-like structure of glass and steel is celebrated for its integration into the New England landscape, and its distilled Modernist character vitalises the artist’s rhythmic visual study. Having used a rotoscope to pick out Johnson’s body from archival video material, Rose then reinserted his figure, shot-by-shot, into her own footage of the Glass House. The opening sequence of the video begins with a blurred depiction of Johnson touring his own house – a retroactive synthesis of personality and design. The artist’s superimposition of body and building posits the celebration of artistic legacy as having a symbiotic link to wider fascinations with morbidity and capture. As this tour of the house proceeds, the figure of Johnson eventually comes into sharper focus, his aged body encapsulated within degraded documentary footage. Rose notes that Philip Johnson himself was inspired to build the Glass House ‘as a mausoleum to ruins,’ having witnessed a village burned to the ground, with brickwork the only surviving material. This confliction of mausoleum and Modernism is the kind of symbolic disjuncture that provides the root system for Rose’s work. Throughout all of her videos, disparate narrative paths are densely composited through the sequential pulse of her edit. The final style and flow of Rose’s videos are executed with a certain flatness, the screen an absent picture plane through which represente environments, lens movements and foley effects swell and sway into intimate contact. Her installations – relaxed habitats, often set up at floor level with multiple pairs of headphones – accommodate her videos as documents to be informally sampled, perhaps voluntarily indulged, but never executed with dominating spatial tension between viewer and screen.”
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Credits cover photo: Rachel Rose, exhibition view (c) Andrea Rossetti / Lafayette Anticipations – Fondation d’entreprise, Galeries Lafayette, Paris, 2020
