Rachel Feinstein, “Maiden, Mother, Crone”, Jewish Museum, New York, November 1, 2019 to March 22, 2020.
Rachel Feinstein was born in 1971 in Arizona. She lives and works in New York City. She mainly develops an often monumental sculptural work with many reminders of painting and drawing. She permanently uses an iconography of European arts and culture from the 16th to the 18th centuries with a marked taste for the baroque and rococo styles. The artist has become a major figure of the current New York art scene.
Skillfully overplaying the effects of her legacies or skillfully caricaturing them in an almost abstract manner, she invents 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 scenarises sumptuousness and ugliness in winks more particularly to Spanish painting but also to Dürer.
His sculptures in plaster or wood veneers always refer to the notion of stucco and artifice. The old-fashioned charm transformed into kitsch aesthetics gives the impression that the work is at the service of an immense decor. Yet the factice 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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