Immersed retinal consciousness, a sensory, experiential channel of light in which the outside and the inside dissolve, the physical and the represented blur and become concept. The opening of an idea evokes neural fire.
– Pamela Rosenkranz
Miguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to announce the opening, on Saturday, May 13, of Pamela Rosenkranz’s Liquid Mimesis, her third solo exhibition at the gallery. The show will be held at our 36 Orchard Street space. The opening reception is Friday, May 19 from 6 to 8PM.
Flickering greenish light, reflective surfaces, works on paper set in translucency and the encounter with the eye, the viewer enters spaces within spaces and a multidimensionally charged atmosphere. Stock images sequenced from the windings of the internet form the substrate of watercolors and eye paintings. Projected on scooped cellulose by inkjet, cut in kirigami style and inked with fine brushstrokes, they seem to be a semi-material, as much permeability as opacity. There is a snakeskin-like object on a plinth at the center of the room. Immersed into glistening light effects and interpellated by the gaze of paintings installed at unconventional heights, the visitor’s position within the architectural shell of the gallery is destabilized from various directions and rendered unfamiliar.
In Rosenkranz’s paintings on mirrors featured in the show, as Simon Baier writes, the “dissolution of the boundaries of experience of the conscious individual continues in the actual mirror image, in which the body can only appear deindividualized: as a fuzzy schema, merged both with the materiality of the tableau and with the surrounding space of color and light that is reflected in it.” The human takes shape as a trace. Here we stand at a far distance from Gerhard Richter’s famous use of unchanged ready-made mirrors, which are able “to generate a precise self-knowledge on the part of the viewer,” continues Baier, “a self-knowledge that requires a sharp separation between self and surroundings.”1
The recurring motif of the snake in the artist’s work appears in this exhibition in the form of an offering of tubular synthetic skin bathed in artificial light. In cultural history, the serpent often functions as a mediating symbol between the uncontrollable forces of nature and human belief, an uncanny figure that somehow manages to resist us, and thus encourages reflection and imagination. If invisible infrastructural conduits, such as water pipes and electronic cables we now depend on, have replaced the traditional awe inspiring snake, Rosenkranz’s hybrid formation of a piece of shed skin made out of a plastic material simultaneously conjures an image of deep past and future.
Concurrent with the exhibition, Rosenkranz’s Old Tree, a monumental sculpture commission for the High Line at the Spur, is on view at 30th Street and 10th Avenue.
Pamela Rosenkranz lives and works in Zürich, Switzerland. Institutional solo exhibitions include Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2021); Fondazione Prada, Milan, (2017); Kunsthalle Basel (2012); and Center d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (2010). Notable group exhibitions include Okayama Art Summit, Japan (2019); Sharjah Biennial 14, United Arab Emirates (2019); 15th Biennale de Lyon, France (2019); and 55th Venice Biennale (2013). In 2015, her project Our Product was selected to represent Switzerland at the 56th Venice Biennale. Rosenkranz’s work is in the permanent collections of Kunsthaus Zürich; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art ,Humlebæk, Denmark; and Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, among others.
_________
1. Simon Baier, “Liquid Mimesis, Inc.,” in Pamela Rosenkranz, House of Meme (Bregenz: Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2021), 111–112.
