Artists

Rochelle Feinstein

Press release

“Humor, irony, sex, human stupidity, commerce, art, and politics are central to my inquiry. My work will not offer a placebo for trauma, self-care, healing, or depict illusory spaces. That is a task for others. My preference, hope, and interest are to provide an opportunity for reflection on the state of affairs of a culture, communicated through painting language.” (Rochelle Feinstein)

For over forty years, the American painter Rochelle Feinstein has developed an oeuvre that infiltrates abstract painting with political, social and environmental concerns. Throughout a series of diverse yet thematically interwoven groups of works, Feinstein cuts, flips, and rearranges printed gestural marks that are then collaged into paintings; she also makes sculptures and prints out of everyday materials. The Today Show presents a range of newly created works that circulate around the question of how to connect canvas, color and gesture with the specific personal and public conditions of our time.

Feinstein was, until her recent retirement, a professor of painting and printmaking at Yale School of Art. Her works engage with different modes of abstraction, like the grid or colour-field painting, all the while letting life crash against modernist notions of art’s autonomy from external reality.