Sperone Westwater is pleased to showcase an online presentation of recent work by Rochelle Feinstein.

Feinstein is constantly on the lookout for what she calls “a good problem to work with,” and her work embodies this sense of alertness. Possibilities present themselves in the course of everyday life, with motifs and headlines drawn from daily newspapers, truisms and enigmatic phrases drawn from conversations and advertisements. Like snags in the fabric of the everyday, these minor details and incidents come to register issues much larger in scale and scope. The Research Park Project emerged from one collection of these vernacular indices. Made at Graphicstudio in Tampa, Research Park Project: Ff combines multiple polychromatic printings of positive and negative text, screened and sewn onto a richly saturated painting. Densely layered, the resulting works create impenetrable fields of excessively Baroque noise.

Since her most recent New York gallery exhibition in April 2017, Feinstein has completed a prestigious fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (2017-2018) and mounted institutional exhibitions at Kunsthaus Baselland (2018) and the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2018-2019). This online presentation includes work from these exhibitions and focuses on a group of works utilizing the rainbow as motif, device, and rubric.

To inaugurate this online presentation, Art in America Editor William S. Smith spoke with Feinstein about her recent work, color therapy, and the language of abstraction. Watch their Zoom conversation here.

An ongoing series of Fulfillment Center works, two of which were included in Feinstein’s 2018 exhibition at the Kunsthaus Baselland, take their name from Amazon warehouses, insinuating a sensuous quality at odds with its corporate nomenclature. Feinstein observes: “The term Fulfillment Center is intentional corporate language, yet like other enigmatic phrases I work with. So, what does Fulfillment mean for me? Certainly it evokes a feeling unrelated to cardboard, and a Center needn’t be in the center. I think of it as a hole, bodily; a cavity or receptacle, an invitation or a dare.” Fashioned from drab cardboard—a material “that has the potential to be anything, while still remaining cardboard”—these paintings conceal all but a single patch of lush powder-pink paint under a coating of resin, conjuring up desire by means of two-day Prime shipping. Where the first two works suggest the fugitive blues and greens of plein-air studies, the latest work in the series explodes in the colors of the rainbow.

Born in 1947, Rochelle Feinstein is a longstanding and deeply respected member of the New York art community. Her work navigates the charged terrain of modernist painting with wry humor and sharp intelligence, unfolding across diverse and thematically interwoven bodies of work which incorporate painting, 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 (2016), and subsequently traveled to Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich (2016), Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover (2017), and the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2018-2019). Other solo exhibitions have taken place at Kunsthaus Baselland (2018) and the 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); and PS1, New York (2004).

Feinstein is Professor Emerita of Painting and Printmaking at Yale University (2017). Among her numerous accolades, she is a recent recipient of the prestigious Rome Prize Jules Guerin Fellowship in Visual Arts, American Academy in Rome (2017-2018). Her work is in museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich; and Amorepacific Museum of Art, Seoul.

For additional works, exhibitions and press, click here.