Rachel Rose at Kunsthaus Bregenz

From 04/02/2017 to 17/04/2017 Rachel Rose at Kunsthaus Bregenz.

“A work starts from very everyday, often subtle feeling. The work becomes an opportunity to learn about another place and time and consider how it might be connected to this present state.”
Rachel Rose, New York, May 2015

Rachel Rose (*1986, New York) is a shooting star on the current U.S. art scene. Specific sites provide the point of departure for her meticulous videos, homages to modern and contemporary buildings. The immersive approach to architecture becomes a fluid experience. Rose has been inspired by Philip Johnson’s renowned 1949 Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut and, in one of her most recent works, by an astronaut’s experience of space walking, shown in the newly constructed Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Her working materials are not images but the senses. At the Serpentine Gallery in London she presented videos and entwining soundtracks, intermeshing inside and outside. In sensitive perception, boundaries to the outside world dissipate. Everything is delivered by the senses, not just images and odors, but even objects and the individual’s body. Kunsthaus Bregenz, designed by architect Peter Zumthor as a space of intense physical experience, is perfectly suited to her videos. Rose always incorporates the specifics of the particular site into her presentations. Bregenz provides an ideal location for her art: place and history, architecture and nature, observing and being by the lake offer crucial inspiration for her work.

Rachel Rose sees surfaces not as a barrier, but as transparent planes and permeable layers. Objects in the space are imbued by her sensuous events just as experiences are by memories. Modern architecture invented transparent façades to open up interior spaces, epitomized by some of its buildings being enclosed solely in glass. One such example is Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. Rose presents the pavilion in a filmic portrait. Impressions of a painting by Nicolas Poussin from the interior become suffused by the surrounding nature, whilst the architect himself makes a ghostly cameo appearance. His blurred presence acts as a guide through his own building, infiltrating space, the garden, and borders – history and the present, image and metaphor merge.

Rachel Rose is the youngest artist to have made an extensive presentation of their work at Kunsthaus Bregenz.
Her invitation however was not without reason, as she has already been honored by exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, New York, the Serpentine Galleries, London, Museo Serralves in Porto, the Castello di Rivoli, and the São Paulo Biennial.

The work of the New York architectural office MOS also plays a significant part in the exhibition in Bregenz. The office, which represented the USA at last year’s Architecture Biennale in Venice, is designing the additional fixtures for the exhibition. Carpets, screens, and loudspeakers have been conceived in collaboration with Rose and fabricated for the exhibition spaces in Bregenz. In unison with the permeating daylight, they create an ambience in which the sensuous is filtered, enriched, and deepened.