Flash Art uses cookies strictly necessary for the proper functioning of the website, for its legitimate interest to enhance your online experience and to enable or facilitate communication by electronic means. To learn more about cookies please see Terms & conditions

Flash Art
Flash Art
Shop
  • Home
    • CURRENT ISSUE
  • Features
    • Conversations
    • Reviews
    • Report
    • On View
    • FLASH FEED
    • Audacious Advice
    • Dance Office
    • Listening In
    • The Uncanny Valley
    • Flashback
    • (In)Visible Hands
    • PARADIGME
  • STUDIOS
    • Dune
    • Flash Art Mono
  • Archive
    • DIGITAL EDITION
    • Shop
    • Subscription
    • INSTITUTIONAL SUBSCRIPTION
    • Contact
→
Flash Art

330 April-May 2020, Reviews

23 April 2020, 3:00 pm CET

Rochelle Goldberg “Psychomachia” Miguel Abreu Gallery / New York by Carlos Kong

by Carlos Kong April 23, 2020
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Rochelle Goldberg, Intralocutor: “You were born. And so you’re Free. So happy birthday”, detail, 2020. Bronze. 42 1/2 x 6 3/4 x 11 in. Courtesy of Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Rochelle Goldberg, Fence [Undone], detail, 2019-2020. Courtesy of Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Rochelle Goldberg, Bread, 2020. Bronze. 42 1/2 x 6 3/4 x 11 in. Courtesy of Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Rochelle Goldberg, Gatekeeper, detail, 2020. Courtesy of Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Rochelle Goldberg, Corpse Kitty: towards a friendly fatality, detail, 2020. Courtesy of Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Rochelle Goldberg, Intralocutor: “You were born. And so you’re Free. So happy birthday”, detail, 2020. Bronze. 42 1/2 x 6 3/4 x 11 in. Courtesy of Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Rochelle Goldberg, The Life and Death of Mary, detail, 2020. Pastel, gouache, acrylic, and silkscreen ink on magazine paper. Nine prints, each: 14 1/2 x 11 in, framed, each: 18 5/8 x 14 1/8 x 1 1/2 in. Courtesy of Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York.

Wild lilies, sand, sourdough bread, tuna cans, gold, eye shadow, desert dirt: these are among the distinctive materials that Rochelle Goldberg sculpts into sensuous configurations. Spanning the organic and inorganic, these things become re-enchanted in “Psychomachia,” bearing a narrative of gestures across their fragmentary forms. A central series of prints, “The Life and Death of Mary” (2020), anchors the exhibition’s context around the biblical story of Mary of Egypt, a prostitute whose repentance and conversion prompted her self-exile in the desert. These haunting images portray the patron saint of penitence and evoke illuminated manuscripts and the warm hues of Redon’s symbolist dream worlds. They underscore Goldberg’s timely interpretation of religion — still an avoided subject in contemporary art — that moves beyond perfunctory moral judgments and instead extrapolates the affective and gendered dynamics of desire, belief, forgiveness, and witnessing.
Goldberg’s floor sculptures reframe references to Mary as abstracted horizontal thresholds across the bounds of presence and absence. In Soiled [Resurrected] (2017–20), rectangular foam segments are coated with chia seeds and dusted with bronze powder and gold; the life-giving nature of seeds counters the sculpture’s aura of a sarcophagus to conjure a ritualized zone between the animate and non-living.

1
2
3
4
Rochelle Goldberg, “Psychomachia.” Exhibition view at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, 2020. Courtesy of Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York.
1
2
3
4
Rochelle Goldberg, “Psychomachia.” Exhibition view at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, 2020. Courtesy of Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York.
1
2
3
4
Rochelle Goldberg, “Psychomachia.” Exhibition view at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, 2020. Courtesy of Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York.
1
2
3
4
Rochelle Goldberg, “Psychomachia.” Exhibition view at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, 2020. Courtesy of Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York.

In Picnic (2020), Goldberg baked bread dough laced with metal coins onto glass bowls. These urn-like forms detail Mary’s material means of survival — from the prostitute’s monetary sale of her body to the mere three loaves of bread that she apparently subsisted on in the desert — and more broadly elicit burial objects and bodily remnants that compound the exhibition’s votive atmosphere.
“Psyche” is the Greek word for “soul,” while “machia” means “battle,” and the exhibition’s titular “battle of the soul” is evident in Goldberg’s three Intralocutor sculptures (all 2020) — bronze busts tinted with colored eye shadow to recall death masks. Goldberg’s neologism “intralocutor” connotes a dialogue with oneself (from the Latin intra, “within” + loqui, “speak”), as opposed to with an interlocutor, an other. These sculptures depict what Goldberg describes as Mary’s “resurrection of her-self as her witness” upon death. Albeit mystical, I find the ethical questions raised by this reflexive act of self-witnessing and self-distancing resonant amid today’s intensified precarity: How can we witness, attune to, and transfigure the unmarked borders of life and death? To whom must we speak within? What subject positions and structures must we release in order to risk being forgiven?

Share this article
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Mail
More stories by

Carlos Kong

Invulnerable Vulnerabilities: Life and Art in the Time of the Virus

20 April 2020, 1:00 pm CET

Nathaniel Mellors: We should talk about some of your work and the exhibition you’re working on for the museum. Tala…

Read More

Jana Euler: Contextual Painting in Times of Global Groundlessness

27 April 2020, 1:00 pm CET

As much as an apt consideration about painting today would have been a welcome opening, there is an elephant in…

Read More

Emily Mae Smith: A Broom of One’s Own

18 May 2020, 1:00 pm CET

Fresh, febrile, shot through with humor and glamour, the paintings of Emily Mae Smith are reliquaries of art history and…

Read More

Maison Margiela Artisanal Apparel – Photography by Rudi Williams

22 May 2020, 12:00 pm CET

NewCostume is a column by Matthew Linde exploring contemporary fashion practice. Episode I: a visual essay by photographer Rudi Williams…

Read More

  • Next

    Jana Euler: Contextual Painting in Times of Global Groundlessness

  • Previous

    Nick Mauss “Bizarre Silks, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, etc.” Kunsthalle Basel

© 2023 Flash Art

  • Terms & conditions
  • Contact
  • Work with Us