Signe Boe Pedersen

interviews

14:46

Rachel Rossin on the Journey to Self-Creation

“All art is like timekeeping.” Meet the multi-talented Rachel Rossin from New York, whose practice spans from painting to programming. Rachel Rossin started working with computers at the age of four and taught herself programming at five. Today, she reflects upon AI and developments beyond, for example, new ways of connecting humans to machines. At the same time, she sees art as one of the oldest and noblest expressions of being human. “It’s making traces of our time here. It’s like timekeeping. It’s a record of the artist’s time. Especially paintings and paintings with their expressionistic marks where you stand in the same place the artist stood. You are looking at a core sample of evidence of the trace the artist’s body made through time and space. I think we will have that as long as we exist. It’s just so precious and perfect.” Rachel Rossin, formed by her readings of the Bible during childhood, sees life as an ongoing journey to self-creation, a type of distilling over and over again: “I think that people that love life the most are the ones that are the most aware of death. It’s so brief. I want to be engaged and as present as I can. It feels like there is a spiritual calling to making art.” Rachel Rossin (b. 1987, Florida, USA) is an internationally recognised artist whose multidisciplinary practice synthesises painting, computer programming, video, built electronics, sculpture, installation, and new media to create works that address the phenomenological effects of technology on daily life. She currently lives and works in New York City, New York, USA. The New York Times has stated, “Ms. Rossin has achieved something, forging a connection between abstract painting and augmented perception that opens up a fourth dimension that existed only in theory for earlier painters.” She is widely considered a pioneer in Virtual and Mixed Realities for her innovative research. Rachel Rossin was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner in June 2023. The interview took place in New York at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Rachel Rossin’s studio in Manhattan.

interviews

04:22

"I love painting because I can make lots of colour in it." | Katherine Bernhardt

“I am a busy body.” Meet the American painter Katherine Bernhardt for a talk about her work, her love for colourful, figurative motives, and why photographs are a great point of departure for starting a painting. “I love the 80’s aesthetic, which is very colourful. I love painting because I can make lots of colour in it. I like places that have lots of colours. I am attracted to colours. Art is a way where people can go and escape from reality. The bigger, the better.” Katherine Bernhardt (b. 1975) grew up in Clayton, MO, and received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts. Over the past two decades, Bernhardt, based in St. Louis, has established herself as one of the most sought-after painters. She first attracted notice in the early 2000s for her paintings of supermodels taken straight from the pages of fashion magazines such as Elle and Vogue. In the decade following, she began making pattern paintings with an ever-expanding list of quotidian motifs. Her vibrant images offer contemplative and multifaceted reflections of various facets of everyday life and pop culture, from childhood sticker books, toilet paper, and coffee makers to E.T., Darth Vader, and the Pink Panther. She cites Henri Matisse, the Pattern and Decoration movement, Peter Doig, and Chris Ofili as artistic influences. Bernhardt chronicles her life and the broader culture through her index of images, synthesizing her visual material with hard-won ease. She takes pleasure in variety and thoroughly investigates each of her obsessions before moving to another. Bernhardt’s trust in the fundamental underpinnings of painting gives her the freedom to depict anything she wants. The democratizing surfaces of her canvases work without illusion, perspective, logical scale shifts, or atmosphere. She is an artists’ artist, admired by many contemporary peers working today as a singular voice in painting. In a palette that ranges from restrained to vivid Day-Glo, Bernhardt paints the canvases face up on her studio floor, employing spray paint, puddles of thinned-out acrylic, and utilitarian brushwork to emphasize aspects of her motifs. Bernhardt’s process is improvisational and loose, at times inviting accident and chance into the works and asserting an equal relationship between artist and material. Bernhardt’s work is held in the collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Portland Museum of Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., among other venues. Katherine Bernhardt was interviewed by Marc-Christoph Wagner in June 2022 in connection with the opening of her show Why is a mushroom growing in my shower? at David Zwirner Gallery in London.