VIENNA.- For over forty years, the American painter Rochelle Feinstein has developed an oeuvre that infiltrates abstract painting with political, social and environmental concerns. Throughout a series of diverse yet thematically interwoven groups of works, Feinstein cuts, flips, and rearranges printed gestural marks that are then collaged into paintings; she also makes sculptures and prints out of everyday materials. The Today Show presents a range of newly created works that circulate around the question of how to connect canvas, color and gesture with the specific personal and public conditions of our time.

Feinstein was, until her recent retirement, a professor of painting and printmaking at Yale School of Art. Her works engage with different modes of abstraction, like the grid or color-field painting, all the while letting life crash against modernist notions of art’s autonomy from external reality.

Whereas twentieth-century modernists propagated a strict separation of painting from the outside world, reducing the medium to colors on a flat surface, Feinstein’s abstractions are intimately connected to the world in all of its chaos: here, art is not a way to escape life’s terrors, nor a realm to immerse oneself in a “pure” and detached perceptual experience. The works therefore confront us with the mess of our reality, its inconsistencies, offensiveness and affections. In this manner, The Today Show also recalls the name of a news show; a humorous hint to the works’ diverse references to contemporary politics and pop culture.

For Feinstein, painting is not a window to a closed illusionary world but fundamentally situated in the here and now. Its material conditions and the process of art-making are a vital aspect of the presentation, as seen in the blue painter’s tape that frames a series of works in the exhibition, or when the canvases are not stretched but rather hang on the wall like cloth. Feinstein makes it clear: she is keenly aware of painting’s alleged higher cultural values. And yet, one can feel the artist’s belief in the potential of her chosen medium to work at the heart of our shared world.

Rochelle Feinstein was born in the Bronx and lives and works in New York City.