WALTHAM, MASS.- The Rose Art Museum announces the opening of its spring exhibitions on Friday, February 14.
Mika Rottenberg: Bowls Balls Souls Holes is Rottenberg’s (b. 1976) first solo museum exhibition in the United States. Conceived in relation to the Rose’s expansive Lois Foster Gallery, the exhibition offers a selective account of the thematic and formal interests that have structured Rottenberg’s development to date. In addition to Squeeze (2010) and Tsss (2013), the Rose will present Rottenberg’s newest video installation, Bowls Balls Souls Holes (2014), a major new work commissioned and funded in part by the museum. A monograph on the artist, with essays by Christopher Bedford, Julia Bryan-Wilson, and Wayne Koestenbaum, will accompany the exhibition.
Chris Burden: The Master Builder presents a near comprehensive account of Burden’s (b. 1946) small-scale Erector set bridges. Modeled after bridges imagined and real, the artist’s Erector set sculptures extend his work as a social engineer, demonstrating his dual commitment to empiric and symbolic inquiry. Burden’s bridges are constructed from vintage and reproduced Meccano and Erector parts, perforated metal construction toys first marketed at the start of the 20th century. As part of The Master Builder, Burden is constructing a two-story Erector set skyscraper that will be installed in the museum in April.
Rose Projects 01A |The Matter That Surrounds Us: Wols and Charline von Heyl inaugurates Rose Projects, a new initiative at the Rose Art Museum. Each project series will consist of three exhibitions addressing different aspects of a thematic, scholarly concern. Since the 1970s, “project” exhibitions in U.S. museums have focused on monographic presentations of young artists in an effort to inject the contemporary into institutional contexts. With the aim of foregrounding curatorial thought and creativity, Rose Projects, by contrast, emphasizes the timeliness of the idea structuring the related projects, marrying careful scholarship to adventurous thinking. Rose Projects 1, organized by Curator at Large Katy Siegel, focuses on artists who refuse the categorical divides between representation and materialist abstraction, image and object, looking instead for different models of reality through paintings that exist on the threshold between the recognizable and the unknown.
The first of Siegel’s three exhibitions brings together artists from different historical moments: Wols, born Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (1913–1951) and Charline von Heyl (b. 1960). Wols and von Heyl use traditional mediums in non-traditional ways, broadening and reveling in the spectrum of possible colors, surfaces, and images they can produce. For both artists, art has the potential to reveal profound desires and realities that often remain unnoticed, or even invisible.
Collection in Focus: The Threshold of Recognition presents work from the Rose collection—Juan Gris’s Le Siphon (1913) and Fernand Léger’s La Femme Bleue (1929)—alongside Thomas Scheibitz’s Nebenwerte (2013). This small exhibition, organized in collaboration with Brandeis Fine Arts Professor Nancy Scott, is part of the museum’s rotating Collection in Focus series, which highlights and draws new connections among important and often understudied objects from its renowned holdings.
Rose Video 02 | Mark Boulos and Josephine Meckseper continues with Meckseper’s (b. 1964) Mall of America (2009), on view through March 16. Lingering on advertisements, shop windows, and the looming architecture of Minnesota’s Mall of America, Josephine Meckseper exposes the political implications and ramifications of American consumer culture.
