ART CITIES: London-Rachel Feinstein

In richly detailed sculptures and multipart installations, Rachel Feinstein investigates and challenges the concept of luxury as expressed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, in the context of contemporary parallels. By synthesizing visual and societal opposites such as romance and pornography, elegance and kitsch, and the marvelous and the banal, she explores issues of taste and desire.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive

Comprising paintings on mirror and a large stained-wood sculpture titled “Metal Storm” (2021), the exhibition “Mirror” is animated by Rachel Feinstein’s fascination with the human figure and historical and cultural narratives. The works in the exhibition refer to German art from the turn of the 16^th century, a period of transition from the Gothic to the Northern Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. Shifting between two- and three-dimensional modes of representation, this new work uses historical and religious symbolism to embody worldwide anxieties of the unknown during the time of COVID. Articulated in oil on mirrored glass, Feinstein’s paintings reference 16^th century sculptural altarpieces carved in unpainted limewood by Tilman Riemenschneider and a polychrome figure by Gregor Erhart, another German sculptor of the era. Technically virtuosic, these artists united Gothic elegance with humanistic expression to represent religious figures including Christ, the apostles, saints, and Mary Magdalene as symbols of compassion, suffering, and love. Beginning with charcoal drawings of figures selected from details of these historical sculptures, Feinstein next developed pastel drawings at full scale on wooden panels, and then painted the images on mirrors. Using brown and grisaille tones to interpret the intricately carved textures of the original works, she represents these figures both individually and in groups. Their eyes are left unpainted, evoking the uncanny sense of becoming one with the painting when the viewer looks into them. The duality of void and reflection in the mirror paintings thereby allows a space for empathy, identification, and comfort. Reanimated by Feinstein, these hybrid bodies convey the complexities of representation and the continued relevance of the past. “Metal Storm” is composed of interlocking wooden planes that represent three female witches engaged in a ritual, holding aloft a fiery container that echoes the flamelike tendrils of the figures’ hair. Voluptuous and in contorted poses, these witches were inspired by a 1514 drawing by Hans Baldung Grien, a protégé of Albrecht Dürer and among the first artists in Europe to feature images of witches in his paintings and prints. Baldung worked in an era when women accused of witchcraft were persecuted in mass numbers, but in his portrayals these figures are mysterious, grotesque, erotic, and intriguing. For Feinstein, the witch represents a power and creativity that existed outside the strictures of patriarchal society—an archetype of femininity that was both feared and revered, and one regarded as a more dynamic creative force than the archetypal figure of the mother.

Born in Fort Defiance, Arizona, and raised in Miami, Rachel Feinstein received a BA in 1993 from Columbia University, New York, where she studied religion, philosophy, and studio art. That same year she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. She found her passion for sculpture under the influence of mentors such as Kiki Smith, Ursula von Rydingsvard, and Judy Pfaff. In 1994 Feinstein was included in several group shows in New York where she presented a large gingerbread house modeled after Sleeping Beauty’s castle in which she slept throughout the exhibition. Feinstein’s work was included in the first iteration of MoMA PS1’s “Greater New York” in 2000. She had her first solo exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, the following year, showing large plaster and wood sculptures of lions, swans, angels, and waterfalls, and transforming one of the galleries into an all-white Rococo-style salon, inspired by imperial palaces in Munich and Vienna. The construction of fantastical, multidimensional environments is integral to Feinstein’s practice. Preferring to see her work in complex interiors, she often brings Baroque elements into exhibition spaces, complicating the relationship between sculpture and painting, positive and negative space. The sculptures, viewed from certain angles, flatten, while the walls seem to expand through Feinstein’s use of mirrors and wallpaper. Seeing her ornate sculptures reflected in her paintings on mirror from the early 2000s, Feinstein began to explore spatial landscapes, notably those depicted in panoramas from the 1800s. Using found images, she created hybrid arcadian landscapes printed on mirrored wallpaper. In 2010–11 Feinstein transformed the modernist interior of Lever House, New York, into a snowy wonderland, rife with stylized elements of Rococo and Gothic design. Three years later her sculpture “Folly” (2014) was installed in New York’s Madison Square Park, marking Feinstein’s first public art exhibition in USA. In 2018 Feinstein produced the “Secrets” series, comprising eight large-scale sculptures that reimagine the Victoria’s Secret “Angels,” as well as ceramic sculptures inspired by Franz Anton Bustelli’s Rococo commedia dell’arte figurines. As in much of her work, the theatrical and the intricate verge on the grotesque, becoming strangely erotic abstractions, and suggesting the body through its absence.

Photo: Rachel Feinstein, Metal Storm, 2021 Stained wood, 93 × 69 ⅜ × 41 ⅞ inches (236 × 176 × 106.2 cm), © Rachel Feinstein. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 17–19 Davies Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 27/1-5/3/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10;00-18:00, https://gagosian.com