NEW YORK, NY.- Sperone Westwater is showcasing a group of recent paintings and photographs by Rochelle Feinstein.
Feinstein is constantly on the lookout for what she calls a good problem to work with, and her work embodies this sense of alertness. Possibilities present themselves in the course of everyday life, with motifs and headlines drawn from daily newspapers, truisms and enigmatic phrases drawn from conversations and advertisements. Like snags in the fabric of the everyday, these minor details and incidents come to register issues much larger in scale and scope.
Since her most recent New York gallery exhibition in April 2017, Feinstein has completed a prestigious fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (2017-18) and mounted institutional exhibitions at Kunsthaus Baselland (2018) and the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2018-19). This online presentation includes work from these exhibitions and focuses on a group of works utilizing the rainbow as motif, device, and rubric.
Born in 1947, Rochelle Feinstein is a longstanding and deeply respected member of the New York art community. Her work navigates the charged terrain of modernist painting with wry humor and sharp intelligence, unfolding across diverse and thematically interwoven bodies of work. In its social and autobiographical reference and attention to language and contemporary culture, Feinsteins work raises trenchant questions about authorship and the role of the artist as public and private figure. A major survey exhibition originated at the Centre dArt Contemporain, Geneva (2016), and traveled to Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich (2016), Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2017), and the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2018-2019). Other solo exhibitions have taken place at Kunsthaus Baselland (2018) and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University (2012). Her work has been featured in the Whitney Biennial (2014) and in exhibitions at such venues as the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2015); the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2012); and the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin (2010). Feinstein is Professor Emerita of Painting and Printmaking at Yale University (2017). Her work is in museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich; and Amorepacific Museum of Art, Seoul.