Rochelle Feinstein’s works often weave together her own subjectivity with historical and vernacular associations, an expansive painting lexicon, and the mythologies and matter of popular culture. The result is an a-stylistic yet deeply personal body of work, each gesture deliberate and vacillating between earnestness and irreverence.
Feinstein was a 2012-13 Radcliffe Institute fellow, where she spent the year working on The Enigma Project. This body of work takes, as it’s starting point, the purposeful, now defunct, decoding devices used during WWII known as enigma machines. The works in this project propose an unscrambling of densely encrypted social codes, public events, intimate utterances, and vernacular speech, through a group of paintings, photographs, drawings, short videos, and a publication. Whether banal or significant, each “signal” is a cipher in want of a visual recoding.
Feinstein’s work is included in the Whitney Biennial, curated by Stuart Comer, Anthony Elms and Michelle Grabner, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2014). Upcoming solo exhibitions include Circus Gallery, Berlin and a solo retrospective at Kunsthalle Bern, Bern Switzerland (both 2015).
On Stellar Rays presented solo exhibitions with Rochelle Feinstein in 2013 and 2011. Other recent solo exhibitions include Higher Pictures, New York, NY (2013); LAB Space/Art Production Fund, New York, NY (2009); Momenta Art, Brooklyn, NY (2008); The Suburban, Chicago, IL (2008). Recent group exhibitions include Circus, Berlin (2014); Martos Gallery, New York, NY (2014); Zach Feuer Gallery, New York, NY (2013) New Galerie, Paris, France (2012); Soloway, Brooklyn, NY (2013, 2012); Fredericks & Freiser, New York, NY (2012); International Print Center, New York, NY; (2012); White Flag, St. Louis, MO (2011).
Rochelle Feinstein is the 2012-13 recipient of a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship. Other recent awards and grants include an American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize, Anonymous Was A Woman grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship, a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant. Feinstein received a BFA from Pratt Institute in 1975 and an MFA from the University of Minnesota in 1978. She was appointed to the Yale University/School of Art faculty in 1994 where she is currently professor and Director of Graduate Studies of painting and printmaking. Her work is in numerous prominent museum and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Miami Art Museum.
