ART-PRESENTATION: Michal Rovner-Evolution

Michal Rovner uses digitally manipulated photography and film to create workss based on abstracted human and natural forms. Rovner has developed a style of multimedia art emphasizing abstraction, beauty, and metaphysical contemplation. Though some of her work is political, the artist says that it is broadly concerned with the human condition.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive

Michal Rovner often plays with viewers’ perceptions and explores the human relationship to the environment. What initially appear to be arrangements of abstract forms reveal themselves as flocks of birds or people floating in the Dead Sea upon closer inspection.  Michal Rovner’s solo exhibition “Evolution”, at Pace Gallery in New York, features video works and prints that mark a return to her unique language. The exhibition include many of the highlights from her previous exhibition at Pace in Palo Alto (9/3-13/5/18), as well as new works and a major video installation. A central work of the exhibition is “Nilus”(2018), stretched across two screens, the work at first appears to be a dark, moody evocation of a jackal, slowly turning its head toward the viewer. A closer look reveals that thee space is filled with dense lines of miniature human figures that resemble hieroglyphics or Hebrew text.  The jacka, known in Hebrew as tanim, is an animal with usually negative connotations but at Rovner says, “It has negative connotations because it is an animal we cannot meet, he comes out only at night. But they were mythological heroes because they were so alert”. Duality and duplication recur across several aspects of this work, and are especially prominent in the double movement: the sporadic movement of the jackal, and the repetitive movement of the human figures, which appear to be marking themselves, or signaling, or calling out for help. Across the works in the exhibition, Rovner presents us with the evolution of these hieroglyphic-like, narrative-less “texts”. At first they are much more representative, clearer, relatively stable; then they become more rapid, fleeting, hard to grasp “I don’t want to tell a story. I’m looking for something underneath the story. It’s very important for me to start with reality. I work with video when my work could have easily been done with animation, as I strip all the people and places of any characteristics. Michal Rovner creates images and installations that operate on the real or symbolic frontiers between reality and fiction, but also between the still and the moving image, or between photography, calligraphy and painting.

Info: Pace Gallery, 537 West 24th Street, New York, Duration: 4/5-23/6/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com