Rachel Feinstein at Marianne Boesky - New York - Brief Article

Visitors to Rachel Feinstein's New York solo debut had to pass beneath the artist's initials, in fancy curlicue script, hanging over the entry of Marianne Boesky's front gallery--an indication, either serious or tongue in cheek, of a precious, Feinstein-controlled domain. Sculptures inside exuded a campy, ye-olde-history theme-park vibe. Eight glossily painted, two-dimensional wooden horses hinged to one another stretched across the room. The cavalcade, bedecked in multicolored plumed headdresses and ornate carousel-style costumes, bespoke a fancy time and place so steeped in flamboyance that even animals had occasion to get dressed up. Feinstein's other, mostly pastel-hued, plaster-and-wood lumpen sculptures were made up of twisted fragments of optically pleasing, dramatic things--a claw, wing, swan head and gold chain could be discerned amid various tangled forms. One piece, Waterfall, included a pair of Pepto-Bismolpink female legs with a short skirt, no torso, and a gilt spike protruding violently upward.

Feinstein's sculptures often have large areas painted white, as if the artist got bored and abandoned them midstream. The horses are painted on one side, perhaps implying the theatrical conceit that it only matters what things look like from the "front." Another sculpture lurking behind the horses had a rainbow-colored spiral staircase leading up to a wooden-roofed shack. On a veranda to one side of the staircase, a figure--a weird cross between Caesar Augustus and a druid--stood as if to look out at the scenery, but a cloak was draped over his head. Viewers approaching the piece encountered a mirror at eye level at the top of the staircase, and were thus given an interactive opportunity to see themselves as part of Feinstein's strange fantasy universe--nonsensical, pseudo-Baroque place that it was.

In fact, the show was inspired by the artist's recent tour of European imperial palaces. Feinstein was especially taken by an all-white Rococo room she saw at the Amalienburg Palace outside Vienna. In homage, she transformed the back gallery at Boesky with a gorgeous, all-white, shallow relief of the courtyard/driveway of an ornate place, coyly dubbed The Sorbet Room. Her barely-there, Versace-style haven was a mansion replete with convertible Rolls, palm trees, candelabra and voluptuous, reclining girls munching grapes. It was at once deliciously cheesy and completely elegant, labor intensive and miragelike. Without screaming for attention, it somehow seems better than the "authentic" thing. In fact, the Courtney Love lyric, "I fake it so real I am beyond fake," came quickly to mind. That Feinstein's one-of-a-kind, royal setting was elusive, impossible to enter or even apprehend, made it all the more captivating.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group