Rachel Feinstein was born in 1971 in Arizona. She lives and works in New York City. She mainly creates often monumental sculptures with many reminders of painting and drawing. She constantly uses an iconography of European arts and culture from the 16th to the 18th centuries with a marked tendency towards the baroque and rococo styles. The artist has become a major figure of the current New York art scene.
She is skilled at overplaying the effects of her legacies as well as cleverly creating caricatures in an almost abstract manner, resulting in a parodic emphasis of the funniest kind.
Not only is this work effective and unexpected, but it also reveals a beauty in its untimely reshaping of classic art genres or themes: royal scenes and representations, angels, etc…. All this arsenal scenarios gorgeousness and ugliness in allusions more particularly to Spanish painting but also to Dürer.
Her sculptures in plaster or wood veneers always refer to the notion of stuccoes and artifices. The old-fashioned charm transformed into a kitsch aesthetic gives the impression that the work is in the service of an endless decor. Yet the factitious style is at the service of the truth of a critical vision that borrows elements from Disney parks as well as from visions of Coppola’s “Marie-Antoinette” or Polanski’s “Tess”.
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