Rachel Libeskind: Transparent Things

About

signs and symbols is pleased to present Transparent Things, Rachel Libeskind’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition features a series of photo-assemblages from the artist’s most recent body of work: Windows.

Each work begins as a small, analogue collage, assembled on a scanner bed, enlarged and inverted. As part of this process, entire fields of color and information are expunged. I print excerpts on a wide selection of materials: latex, silicone, fiberglass netting, different types of PVC and ripstock — and then cut up, paint over, paste, enlighten, liberate and destroy each into finished pieces, stretched over “traditional” painting stretcher bars. The works’ transparent plasticine surfaces become picture-book windows, the frame, the panes, the view inside and out. These are mysterious, self-aware objects which obfuscate the history of their own creation — a single moment of making captured, preserved. Each work is a mirror, a window, a portal — a transparent thing, “through which the past shines.”
—Rachel Libeskind, Berlin 2022

“Most windows look out onto the world, but Rachel Libeskind’s Windows attend to the negative spaces created by the materiality of surfaces upon which the subject matter is printed. Known for composing narrative through photo-based collage, Libeskind expands her vocabulary of image appropriation and manipulation in this new body of work. In Windows (2022), she viscerally breaks through the plane of the image into the physical media that the images are printed on, which is translucent in some areas and completely transparent in others. These compositions draw inward — focusing on the architecture of the stretcher bars as windows into negative space — a new terrain for the artist. The windows reference Warhol, Rauschenberg and other Pop Art giants, placing Libeskind’s collage practice within a dialogue of Pop nomenclature; the negative space and the grids invoke key Minimalist inquiries.

“Libeskind also brings the naked human body into the conversation — so often the artist explores feminism in her narratives, yet here the structure and strips of material act as a nude figure. In previous bodies of work, the viewer could not see the bones of the stretcher beneath the canvas, but the windows here are nude — scantily clad in appropriated imagery, the viewer is a voyeur more than ever. Instead of unclothed breasts, one is confronted with the nakedness of the work’s construction. The bones and scaffold of the grid are on view, delicate and intimate — gently asking one to reconsider the imagery with a newfound vulnerability.”
—Bryan Faller

rachel libeskind is a multidisciplinary artist whose research-based practice examines the construction of history and the enduring power of images. Working across collage, installation, video and performance, Libeskind appropriates and recontextualizes images in order to disrupt imposed boundaries — between the personal and public, ancient and contemporary, societal and cultural — and reveal unexpected parallels. Libeskind has presented solo exhibitions, installations and performances at Center for Jewish History, New York; Watermill Center, Long Island; Pioneer Works, Brooklyn; and Mana Contemporary, Miami. She has also been included in group exhibitions at institutions such as ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe; Alabama Contemporary Art Center, Mobile; Baker Museum, Naples, Florida; Carpenter Center at Harvard University, Cambridge; and National Media Arts Festival of Lithuania, Vilnius. She holds a B.A. with honors from Harvard University. Born in Milan and raised in Berlin, Libeskind is now based between New York and Germany. Libeskind’s collage works are included in Phaidon Press's forthcoming book Vitamin C+: Collage in Contemporary Art, to be released in spring 2023. In 2024, Libeskind will be the subject of a solo exhibition at Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University, Alabama.