'Roee Rosen. The Kafka Companion to Wellness' opens at Kunstverein Hannover
The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Thursday, November 14, 2024


'Roee Rosen. The Kafka Companion to Wellness' opens at Kunstverein Hannover
Roee Rosen, The Standard Edition, Gouache auf Digitaldruck, 2016–2022.



HANOVER.- Roee Rosen (b. 1963, Rehovot, Israel) has carved out a singular position in the arts with his cast of fictitious, part-fictitious, and real-life characters which, for over three decades now, have appeared across a variety of media, from gouaches to paintings to film, books, and installation.

“Those of you who heard of me, know that I have built my entire career on lies, scandals, obscene pictures, fake identities. I have pretended not to be myself. No more. It is urgent to do the right, difficult thing,” says the artist in his film The Confessions of Roee Rosen (2007), in which he is played by three illegal labor migrants. In Two Women and a Man (2005), on the other hand, Rosen appears in person, but as a fictitious female scholar de- livering a television interview about Justine Frank, an obscure Surrealist painter who, in fact, never existed yet her works are found in art collections. Aside from creating a cinematic nar- rative, Rosen has developed Frank’s whole oeuvre of oil paintings and gouaches, complete with personal photographs and the controversial book she wrote (Sweet Sweat, Sternberg Press, 2009). Through her biography, Rosen speaks of an impossible past and imagines a different present. Poetic as they are, Rosen’s works draw upon the very extremes of human existence: life, death, but also sexuality, which is a frequent motif, deployed as one of the driving forces in his scenarios. Maxim Komar-Myshkin, another character brought to life by Rosen, is a Russian dissident artist and émigré. Obsessed with the thought of being inevitably killed on the orders of Vladimir Putin, Myshkin took his own life in 2011, leaving behind a series of gouaches conceived as a grim fairy tale—both a testimony to his own gripping paranoia and an ultimate act of retaliation—in which his nemesis is the victim of a delirious sequence of events as his unsatiated appetite for satisfaction blurs the borders be- tween dream and reality.

As masterfully as he conjures up the roster of his characters, Rosen crafts layered narratives that feed off culture, politics and, inevitably, his own experience. His most recent film, Kafka for Kids (2022), which has been long in the making, takes the form of a pilot episode for a TV program for children. There, Franz Kafka’s short story The Metamorpho- sis is itself transformed into a psy- chedelic séance that draws out the superb simplicity of the writer’s idea of what it means to wake up one day as a cockroach, as well the political ramifications of such a predicament. No matter how close or distant his characters and references are, Rosen remains implicated in all of them. For Lucy is Sick (2020-2024), the artist created a coloring book for adults that is an account of dealing with an illness—something that is perhaps impossible to grasp solely from the use of dry, technical terms and which yearns to be filled out with personal content. For The Gaza War Tattoos (2024), the artist, similarly makes use of an oxymoronic language, just as he had been throughout his practice, to put in perspective the sense of safety and its lack.

For Rosen—with his background in philosophy, literature, and visual arts—humor is a tool that he has rehearsed and mastered for years. But laughter is only a side-effect of trespassing between the places, lands, and nations, between what constitutes the work of historians, the results of political actions and their impact, and what is the work of the imaginary. “I am Roee Rosen,” one of his three effigies further reveals in Confessions: “I was born in a small, dismal village in Israel, four years be- fore 1967. My wonderful parents have bequeathed me a feeling heart; for them, it was the source of their felicity, for me, it was the foundation of all my misfortunes. Everything was painful, and the pains of others were even more unbearable than my own.”

Roee Rosen. The Kafka Companion To Wellness, spanning over a hundred gouaches, paintings and films of Roee Rosen, is his first major solo presentation in Germany in almost a decade, curated by Christoph Platz- Gallus and Krzysztof Kosciuczuk. It is accompanied by a publication of Rosen’s book The Standard Edition, began in 2016 and completed recently, published by Distanz Verlag and Kunstverein Hannover.










Today's News

November 11, 2024

Di Donna Galleries opens 'Hallowed Ground: Tanguy, Lam, Penalba, Cárdenas'

V&A opens first major exhibition celebrating the 'Golden Age' of the Mughal Court

Almine Rech New York opens Visages, a group show

The Fine Art & Estate Auction comes to Turner Auctions + Appraisals on November 30

Hidden treasures unveiled: Iconic film stars of the 1950s and 1960s featured in new exhibition

The Royal Academy of Arts opens 'Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence, c. 1504'

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts opens new presentation of its Inuit art collection

'Ai Weiwei: Don Quixote' opens at MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leon

Museum Würth to show a comprehensive exhibition on Christo and Jeanne-Claude

Pace opens Loie Hollowell's first solo presentation in Southern California

Gagosian exhibits new paintings by Sabine Moritz in Beverly Hills

Kunstmuseum Ravensburg presents 'Walk This Way'

'Tom Thomson: North Star' exhibition travels to the Beaverbrook Art Gallery

Exquisite miniatures by Wes and Rachelle Siegrist at Lyman Allyn Art Museum

Young designers explore the body

Art Gallery of New South Wales presents first major solo exhibition of Nusra Latif Qureshi

Multidisciplinary team combines visual art, music, video, design, and technology in new exhibition

'Roee Rosen. The Kafka Companion to Wellness' opens at Kunstverein Hannover

Galerie-Peter-Sillem exhibits Anastasia Samoylova's latest series

Jonathan Gardner's fourth exhibition at Casey Kaplan opens in New York

moniquemeloche exhibits a new series of paintings by Jake Troyli

The National Gallery year ahead round up 2024 and 2025

Exhibition marks the centenary of Ivan Picelj's birth




Museums, Exhibits, Artists, Milestones, Digital Art, Architecture, Photography,
Photographers, Special Photos, Special Reports, Featured Stories, Auctions, Art Fairs,
Anecdotes, Art Quiz, Education, Mythology, 3D Images, Last Week, .

 



Founder:
Ignacio Villarreal
(1941 - 2019)
Editor & Publisher: Jose Villarreal
Art Director: Juan José Sepúlveda Ramírez
Writer: Ofelia Zurbia Betancourt

Attorneys
Truck Accident Attorneys
Accident Attorneys
Holistic Dentist
Abogado de accidentes
สล็อต
สล็อตเว็บตรง

Royalville Communications, Inc
produces:

ignaciovillarreal.org juncodelavega.com facundocabral-elfinal.org
Founder's Site. Hommage
to a Mexican poet.
Hommage
       

The First Art Newspaper on the Net. The Best Versions Of Ave Maria Song Junco de la Vega Site Ignacio Villarreal Site Parroquia Natividad del Señor
Tell a Friend
Dear User, please complete the form below in order to recommend the Artdaily newsletter to someone you know.
Please complete all fields marked *.
Sending Mail
Sending Successful