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Email PageFields of Fire
February 16, 2006- March 18, 2006
Michal Rovner
PaceWildenstein
534 W 25th St Michal Rovner Fields of Fire (2005) |
The exhibition includes works from 2005-2006 created after the artist’s 2004 journey across Central Asia. At Rovner’s final stop on that trip, a remote oil drilling camp in The Republic of Kazakhstan, she found and filmed the elements from which she composed various works. Rovner used the jet of flame, which shoots from the tops of oilrig smokestacks as natural gas is bled off of the well, as her primary subject.
The largest piece, Fields of Fire (2005) was on view last year in the artist’s solo show at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. New works are being exhibited for the first time including video pieces from two series entitled: Postcards and Hybrid Fields.
Rovner is primarily known for her use of highly abstracted human figures as the building blocks of images that recall systems as diverse as writing or laboratory cell cultures. In the current work, for the first time, the artist utilizes the undulated contours of the flame to create the work.
The artist recently remarked about Fields of Fire, “I went to the oilfields because after all it is in the center of the world’s attention. In the course of the process I understood that the oilfields are not the issue, but just some kind of an undercurrent, an optional point of reference. For me the work relates to a timeline of changes, a seismograph of life, private or global or another form of life with the consecutive changes which occur. Most of my works deal with situations, which are not changing. Here it is a situation, which is not stable even for one second, and its consistency is expressed in an endless, unstoppable tension between what is predicted and what seems to be unknown.”
In Fields of Fire, Postcards, Hybrid Fields, and the recent paintings, Rovner harnesses the ethereal, yet voracious nature of her subject in her ongoing examination of processes, which consume, regenerate, reorganize and decay.
Michal Rovner (b. 1957, Israel) studied cinema, television, and philosophy at Tel-Aviv University and received a B.F.A. in photography and art at the Bezalel Academy. In 1978 she co-founded Tel Aviv’s Camera Obscura Art School for studies in photography, video, cinema, and computer art. Ten years later, she moved to New York City.
Some of many Rovner’s video installations include Overhang (2000), a site-specific installation at the Chase Manhattan Bank on Park Avenue in New York City; Overhanging (1999) at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Mutual Interest (1997) at the Tate Gallery, London, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and P.S.1, New York (1999). Her films have been screened internationally at several museums. Notes (2001), a collaboration with composer Philip Glass, was screened at the Lincoln Center Festival 2001, New York and the Barbican Theater, London. Rovner’s film Border (1997) premiered at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and received over a dozen subsequent screenings at major international venues including the Tate Gallery, London; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Michal Rovner’s work is in several permanent collections worldwide including: The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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