NinaJohnson

Rochelle Feinstein and Unlike Müller collaborate on a work for a locked down New York City

August 1st, 2020

Callicoon Fine Arts: ROCHELLE FEINSTEIN AND ULRIKE MÜLLER

Callicoon Fine Arts is pleased to present an installation in the gallery’s storefront window of a work made collaboratively by Rochelle Feinstein and Ulrike Müller during New York City’s COVID-19 lockdown. 

Titled “Coming Soon”, the work is comprised of 24 cardboard panels held together with grommets and yarn, and installed on a freestanding plywood wall that is viewable from the sidewalk during daylight hours. Accompanying the paintings in the window is a printed poster, taped to the glass, showing the titles of each individual panel. The titles are presented as text message “speech bubbles” starting with the title of the work as a whole, and moving through each panel and each row line by line from the upper right of the grid. 

Without access to their studios, and using materials they had at hand, the panels track responses to the unfolding crisis caused by the spread of the virus. Feinstein’s paintings, with line-making charged with energy and immediacy, incorporate yarn and canvas fragments. Her panels provide the “data”, rendering info-charts that, for instance, visualize the flattening of the curve, or the increase in daily deaths due to the virus.

Müller’s panels introduce “creatures”, a chorus of animal-like characters rendered in paired-down volumes and shapes. Alternating with the data, the creatures index confusion, frustration, anger and even an exhausted indifference. From puppyish to bovine, they seem to be switching identities while under pressure to respond to the data charts.

Putting their distinct approaches to work, Feinstein und Müller formulate their response to the crisis at the intersection of the factual and the subjective, each in her own way. 

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With her work Rochelle Feinstein (born 1947) navigates the charged terrain of modernist painting with wry humor and sharp intelligence, unfolding across diverse and thematically interwoven bodies of work.  While always drawing upon the conventions of painting, her works incorporate drawing, photography, printmaking, sculpture, video, and installation.  In its social and autobiographical reference and attention to language and contemporary culture, Feinstein’s work raises trenchant questions about authorship and the role of the artist as public and private figure.

A major survey exhibition of Feinstein’s work originated at the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, curated by Fabrice Stroun and Tenzing Barshee (2016), and subsequently traveled to Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, curated by Stephanie Weber (2016), Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover, curated by Christina Vegh (2017), and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, curated by Sergio Bessa (2018-2019).  Other solo exhibitions have taken place at Kunsthaus Baselland , curated by Ines Goldbach(2018),  University of South Florida Contemporary Arts Museum (2014), Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University (2012). Her work has been featured in the Whitney Biennial (2014) and in exhibitions at such venues as the Contemporary Art Museum,  St. Louis (2015); the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2012); the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin (2010). Feinstein’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group shows since the early 1990s in the US and Europe, in galleries, and in a varied range of artist-run cooperatives, nomadic spaces, bookstores, and nail salons , Her recent publications include Pls. Reply, a selection of her writing, 2019 pub. Ugly Duckling Press, the eponymously named Monograph (2016) of her retrospectives, ed.Stephanie Weber and  pub., Walter Konig, Verbatim Hoc Moda/The Abramovic Method, (2016), pub., On Stellar Rays, and I’m With Her (2015), pub., Black Dog Press.

Ulrike Müller (born 1971, Austria) live and works in Brooklyn, NY. She engages relationships between signification and bodies, and a concept of painting that is not restricted to brush and canvas. Employing a wide range of materials and techniques including performance, publishing, and textiles, her work moves between different contexts and publics, invites collaboration, and expands to other realms of production in processes of exploration and exchange. Müller studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria, and participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York. 

This September, Müller will debut a major commission at the Queens Museum, New York, titled The Conference of Animals. She was nominated for the Kunstpreis der Boettcherstrasse and will be included on the accompanying group show at the Kunsthalle Bremen this month. Or both, a solo survey exhibition of Müller's work curated by Mia Locks, was mounted at The Galleries at Moore College of Art & Design, Philadelphia, in 2019. In 2018, Müller had a major solo exhibition at the Kunstverein Düsseldorf, titled Container. Additional solo exhibitions have taken place Callicoon Fine Arts in New York (2014, 2016); mumok - Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation (2015), and Kunstraum Lakeside (2014), both in Austria. At mumok, Müller co-curated the collection exhibition Always, Always, Others with Manuela Ammer. The book, Always, Always, Others was published on the occasion of Müller's exhibitions at mumok by the museum and Dancing Foxes Press (2017). 

Müller’s work was recently on view in May You Live in Interesting Times, the International Art Exhibition at the 58th Venice Biennale, curated by Ralph Rugoff. She has participated in major group exhibitions including 57th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, in 2018; the 2017 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon at the New Museum, New York, in 2017; Invisible Adversaries at the Hessel Museum of Art, New York, in 2016; and Painting 2.0 at Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2015), and mumok, Vienna (2016). 

In 2010, Müller represented Austria in the Cairo Biennial. She was a co-editor of the queer feminist journal, LTTR (2001–06), and organized Herstory Inventory. 100 Feminist Drawings by 100 Artists, a collaborative project that was exhibited together with objects from the respective collections at the Brooklyn Museum and at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2012. 

Callicoon Fine Arts is located at 49 Delancey Street between Forsyth and Eldridge Streets. Gallery hours are by appointment only. The nearest subway stops are the B and D trains at Grand Street and the F, J, M and Z trains at Delancey-Essex Street.

 

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