Rochelle Feinstein at Kunsthaus Glarus
In the bright, white-cube spaces of Kunsthaus Glarus, Rochelle Feinstein’s The Today Show mobilizes the history of abstraction as both a repository of common coin references and a platform for meta-commentary. Borrowing its title from NBC’s long-running morning program—a reliable dispenser of pacified news—the exhibition situates painting within a formalistic continuity that, like its televisual namesake, promises constant renewal but delivers familiarity through predictable cadence and individual styles.
The rainbow palette permeating the exhibition—Feinstein’s primary vocabulary since 2016—presents a feel-good symbolism stress-tested and made strange by the sheer number of paintings. As the artist notes in conversation with curator Melanie Ohnemus, these colors intensify the worse things get, reflecting her reaction to America’s hard-right political shift since 2015. This chromatic insistence recurs across diverse surfaces and techniques—from silk-screened muslin to UV prints on fabric and acrylics on drop cloths.
Combining techniques previously used in distinct series, Feinstein’s work is formally intricate and conceptually charged with painting’s histories and ramifications. Unlike On Kawara’s meticulous documentation of time through painting, Feinstein’s approach to everyday experience remains deliberately oblique. Works from the “Dawns” (on drop cloths) and “Trauma Buddies” series, 2024, resist singular readings; the latter works, for example, cheekily borrow a phrase used by Brad Pitt and George Clooney to describe mutual support in hardship, using pop culture as a lens to explore how shared trauma can be visualized, while her process of digitally elaborating the painted gesture riffs on its expressive immediacy. Incorporating AI-generated dawn images in the “Golden Moments, Silver Linings” series (2021–24), Feinstein places them “upside down—where they should be,” reframing technological simulation as a material condition rather than a neutral tool.
“I’m not a gestural artist,” Feinstein clarifies, less as opposition to expressionism than as a reconsideration of artistic expression’s mythologies of immediacy, affect, and self-containment, instead providing materials and strategies for experiencing painting as a nonlinguistic phenomenon. The exhibition unfolds as controlled anarchy, positing the tension between sameness and novelty as an engine for artmaking.
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