Rochelle Feinstein in Aachen: The Today Show
For four decades, New Yorker Rochelle Feinstein has expanded expectations of an abstract visual language. The 78-year-old, who started as an illustrator and fashion designer, uses artificial intelligence or digital processes in addition to ephemeral materials such as cardboard, cloths ordered on Amazon or scanned shopping bags.
These works, which are in a stale metamorphosis, appear picturesque only at first glance. They move at the interface of print and brushstroke, but also at the boundaries of sculpture and collage. They are partly displayed on rolling trolleys, which look like they were parked by chance, or framed with adhesive tape.
Until 2017, Feinstein taught for many years at Yale University in New York. She invokes heroes of art history and sometimes parodies the pathetic gestures of the mostly male painters. But she also cites female role models such as Lee Krasner, who repeatedly revised her own works and, like Feinstein, titled the names of tenses and modes of verbs.
In the exhibition “The Today Show” at the Ludwig Forum Aachen, one encounters large-scale rainbow paintings with which Feinstein denounces the commercialization of the queer solidarity movement as a meaningless shell. Mobiles from hand-colored Polaroids of sunsets, found via Google, question the longing for idyll. The diptych “Tagged” with screen printing of historical boxing fights in fascist Italy refers to today’s political conflicts.
Breakfast television as a world distortion
Since the re-election of Donald Trump, Feinstein has been trying to comment on the consequences of his policy with the means of abstract painting, which cannot always be directly deciphered. Nevertheless, one remains at it and can only nod in agreement if she already criticizes the rampant inclination to media spectacles in the exhibition title.
“The Today Show” refers to NBC’s US-American breakfast television of the same name. This program mixes news with appearances by celebrities and thus not only drifts into the infotainment, but also distorts the perception of reality.
“My work is neither a placebo for trauma, self-care or healing, nor does it create illusionistic spaces – I leave that to others,” says Feinstein. “My hope is to open a space for reflection on the current state of culture, conveyed through the language of painting.” In Aachen, this deliberately imperfect and often absurd language actually becomes the mirror of a chaotic present: unstable, restless and in constant downward mode.
