highlike

RACHEL FEINSTEIN

Рэйчел Файнштейн
راشيل فينشتاين
레이첼 파인 스타 인

humpers

RACHEL FEINSTEIN

source: gagosian

Rachel Feinstein was born in 1971 in Defiance, Arizona. She studied at Columbia University and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions, including “The Alliance,” Hyundai Gallery, Beijing, China (2008, traveled to Hyundai Gallery, Korea); “Something About Mary,” Metropolitan Opera House, New York (2009); “Rachel Feinstein: The Snow Queen,” Lever House, New York (2011); and “The Little Black Dress,” SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia (2012). Feinstein lives and works in New York.
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source: apaporkr

1971년 미국 아리조나주 포트 디파이언스에서 태어난 레이첼 파인스타인은 컬럼비아대학교에서 종교와 철학 및 스튜디오 아트를 전공했고, 스코웨건 회화•조각 학교에서 수학했다. 유리 위에 유화를 그리거나 석고와 나무를 사용해 조각을 만들어온 파인스타인은 바로크 양식과 동화에서 영감을 얻은 조각 작품으로 잘 알려져 있다. 2001년 뉴욕 마리안 보에스키 갤러리에서 첫 개인전을 가진 후, 소더비(뉴욕, 2002), 르 콘서시움(디종, 2006), 레버하우스(뉴욕, 2011), 가고시안 갤러리(로마, 2012) 등에서 개인전을 개최했다. 주요 그룹전으로는 <패스트럴 팝>(휘트니미술관, 2000), <십자가에 못 박힌 예수>(프리드리히 페첼 갤러리, 2004), <2회 안양공공예술프로젝트>(2007), <디 얼라이언스>(갤러리 현대 베이징, 2008), <썸띵 어바웃 메리>(메트로폴리탄 오페라 하우스, 2009), <리틀 블랙 드레스>(SCAD현대미술관, 사바나, 2012) 등이 있으며, 마크 제이콥스와 같은 패션디자이너와 협업을 진행하기도 했다.
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source:friezecom

Rachel Feinstein’s isolated arabesques of plywood seemed marooned in the cavernous gallery space. With little conversation between them, they maintained a sulky autonomy that was rather a shame, considering their individual articulacy. Mother and Children (2007) is a song of varnished wood with monkey-like riffs and a chorus of curves, while Deposition (2007) is a more sombre, nearly monochromatic, ode to innards, with a pancreatic scalloped bit and an escaping tract of ooze. Although describing these works becomes an exercise in analogy, calling for a raft of phenomenological equivalences, there is no unifying analogy to draw them together beyond the immediately sculptural one: their classical arrangement asks us to consider each of them as an autonomous element.

The sculptures’ faceted construction and simple colour schemes reduce them to a visual rather than tactile proposition, more like drawings or cartoons that have complicated themselves into three dimensions. At times Feinstein limits the amount of pictorial information – the humanizing work of Mother and Children, for instance, is performed almost entirely by representations of ears and arms – but elsewhere she is more explicit. Humpers (2006) leaves little interpreting work for us to do: stockings, high heels, beard, nipples and pubis are crudely painted in, and the woman’s pale arm slots at the hand around a picket-fence post of a cock. The chocks of wood that hold together the sheets of plywood are left pragmatically visible, giving us the impression that the man’s penis and ear are vital to the couple’s position. These pleasing structural–pictorial coincidences become the pivots of the work, like moments of theatrical ingenuity, when representation is achieved through unexpected means. The Eve figure in Adam and Eve (2007) creates just such a hotspot where her arm, holding an apple aloft, penetrates a hole in the canopy of the tree – a pastoral equivalent of the cinematic steam train entering the proverbial tunnel, perhaps.

The multiple viewpoint of each piece, and the many images that they create, depending on which angle you approach them from, demands a sort of cinematic mode of looking. Walking around them releases moments of sense, like Hans Holbein’s anamorphic device in The Ambassadors (1533), while contemplating them from a single, stationary vantage point recalls the simultaneity of Cubism. The relationship between painting and sculpture in Feinstein’s work has been explicit for some time, and here the point at which they meet takes on the attributes of a pop-up greetings card: a declarative and decorative low-fi classicism. And then again, with some pieces done up in thick domestic gloss colour and others varnished to show off the wood grain, we might think of them as ornate and rather impractical room dividers.

Although the work references many pivotal points in art history, we are reminded that such historical radicalism is no longer an option. Feinstein’s litany of styles and quotations becomes a horizontal process of garnering as she fuses Renaissance and Neo-Classical references with a Modernist multiplicity and embeds within them singular identifiable motifs: an echo of the flowing hair of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (c. 1485–6), Tom Wesselmann’s soft-porn Pop, the irrepressible uprightness of David Smith – take your pick from the grab bag of history. It is as though Feinstein is attempting to articulate a position for sculpture now, in the way that painters have for some decades, reaching innumerable end-games that have been surmounted by new gambits or a reappraisal of vocabulary, both in practice and in commentary. But while this fluctuation between painterly and sculptural concerns is interesting, it is probably loading the work with far too grand an ambition, crediting Feinstein with more of a revisionist intention than is actually the case. It is more likely that she is involved in a practice of visual indulgence and historical irreverence. The obvious pleasure she takes in camped-up appropriation, and refinement of surface and form implies a viewpoint that is turned inwards to the work, not outwards towards historical context.Sally O’Reilly