A meteoric black egg quietly sits in an algae-filled stream, its artificial presence is surreal, as life in the forest inherently is. The egg is the original alchemical symbol for the first beginning and the last end of life. And this scene, in which the electric green of the algae could be as much toxic pollution as it could be primordial life, suggests the deep past and near future, the beginning and the end, are right here together.
Rachel Rose (b. 1986) explores how our changing relationship to landscape has shaped storytelling and belief systems. She draws from and contributes to a long history of cinematic innovation, and through her subjects—whether investigating cryogenics, the American Revolutionary War, modernist architecture, or the sensory experience of walking in outer space—she questions what it is that makes us human and the ways we seek to alter and escape that designation.
Rose’s work has been included in group exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018); the 57th Venice Biennale, the 32nd São Paulo Biennial, and the Hayward Gallery, London (2016); and the Okayama Art Summit, Japan (2016). Recent and upcoming solo exhibition venues include the Park Avenue Armory, New York (2022); the Pond Society, Shanghai, and Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2020); the Fridericianum, Kassel, and the LUMA Foundation, Arles (2019); the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2018); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2017); the Museu Serralves, Porto, and the Aspen Art Museum (2016); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Serpentine Galleries, London, and the Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2015). Rose is the recipient of the 2018 Future Fields Award and the 2015 Frieze Artist Award. She lives and works in New York.