Michal Rovner: Pragim
Pace Gallery, New York
March 8 – April 18, 2024
Pace presents an exhibition of works by Michal Rovner at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. The show, titled Pragim—the Hebrew word for Poppies—features prints, video works, and installations from a series the artist started in 2019. Over the last five years, as part of this long-term project, Michal Rovner has filmed and drawn wild poppies that grow in her field in Israel.
For more than 30 years, Michal Rovner’s practice has centered on universal questions of the human condition—bringing issues of identity, place, and dislocation to the fore. The poppy—which carries different associations and meanings around the world—embodies both fragility and fortitude, as well as memorial and loss. The ongoing war has impacted the artist’s perspective on her Pragim works, as they now also powerfully reflect the state of unrest and anguish afflicting the region. Using a dark palette of black, gray, and red, the artist imbues her human-scale staccato swaying poppies with harsh and tragic qualities.
Working across drawing, printmaking, video, sculpture, and installation, the artist often obscures identifying details and specifics of time and place in her layered compositions, creating abstract yet resonant reflections of reality and the human experience. One of her most famous projects is Makom (Place), a series of monumental cubic structures composed of stones of dismantled or destroyed Israeli and Palestinian homes from Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Haifa, the Galilee, and the border between Israel and Syria. The Makom series echoes conflicts in the past and present. Working with Israeli and Palestinian masons, Michal Rovner addresses the possibility of creating together, in a shared experience of reconstructing and rebuilding.
MICHAL ROVNER (b. 1957, Tel Aviv, Israel) works with drawing, printmaking, video, sculpture, and installation to reflect on the continuum of human experience. Her work shifts constantly between the poetic and the political, using imagery that invokes the fragility of existence, identity, dislocation, and time. Generally avoiding direct representation of specific issues or events, Michal Rovner reinterprets the present and historical memory. She records and erases visual information, obscuring specifics of time and place through gestural, abstract qualities.
Important historic exhibitions and installations of her work include Michal Rovner: The Space Between, Whitney Museum of American Art (2002); Against Order? Against Disorder?, Venice Biennale (2003); Incidental Affairs, Suntory Museum, Osaka (2009); Michal Rovner: Histoires, Musée du Louvre, Paris (2011); and Michal Rovner: Transitions, Canary Wharf, London (2019). Michal Rovner’s work resides in numerous public collections worldwide including The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Paris Audiovisuel, France (Collection of the City of Paris); and The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel, among others.
PACE GALLERY
540 West 25th Street, New York City
