Ratlin's Borg, 2024
Wood, polystyrene, cardboard, chicken wire, burlap, cement, acrylic,
high density polyethylene, and virtual reality headset
210.80 x 152.40 x 129.50 cm
82.99 x 60.00 x 50.98 inch
82.99 x 60.00 x 50.98 inch
Konrad Fischer Galerie is proud to announce its debut exhibition with Rachel Harrison, opening 26 April on the occasion of Gallery Weekend Berlin. For the past thirty years, Harrison has harnessed the tools of abstraction to touch a cultural nerve. This new body of work heightens her longstanding interest in the effects of mediation, used here to cross competing visual regimes and as a spur to formal invention.
A set of photographs document the 2006 Westminster Dog Show as seen on the artist's TV-a live event obscured through dense layers of human and mechanical inscription. The images were shot with a 35-mm camera off the curve of a convex screen, and the final prints retain the texture of filmic grain and the ghosted grid of TV transmission. Elsewhere, handmade and hand-painted sculptures are studded with found objects and suggestive forms, some of which channel twentieth-century touchstones (Alberto Giacometti, Donald Judd). One figurative protrusion stares blankly from behind the darkened lenses of a VR headset, as if to quit the here-and-now of sculptural encounter for parts unknown. Another bust-like mass sits adjacent to a broken 3-D printer, while a pair of scissors hang at the ready from the pedestal below. Scratched abrasions mar the surface of a nearby inkjet print, and fingermarks trowel the cement-covered facade of Harrison's Wall Work. Both expressive and patently manual, such traces impress themselves on the real-they register the impulse to act on the surrounding world and leave it changed.
Rachel Harrison lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the Astrup-Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2022-23) and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2019-20). Her work is in numerous institutional collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Cleveland Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annanale-on-Hudson, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Saint Louis Art Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Modern, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; among others.
A set of photographs document the 2006 Westminster Dog Show as seen on the artist's TV-a live event obscured through dense layers of human and mechanical inscription. The images were shot with a 35-mm camera off the curve of a convex screen, and the final prints retain the texture of filmic grain and the ghosted grid of TV transmission. Elsewhere, handmade and hand-painted sculptures are studded with found objects and suggestive forms, some of which channel twentieth-century touchstones (Alberto Giacometti, Donald Judd). One figurative protrusion stares blankly from behind the darkened lenses of a VR headset, as if to quit the here-and-now of sculptural encounter for parts unknown. Another bust-like mass sits adjacent to a broken 3-D printer, while a pair of scissors hang at the ready from the pedestal below. Scratched abrasions mar the surface of a nearby inkjet print, and fingermarks trowel the cement-covered facade of Harrison's Wall Work. Both expressive and patently manual, such traces impress themselves on the real-they register the impulse to act on the surrounding world and leave it changed.
Rachel Harrison lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the Astrup-Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2022-23) and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2019-20). Her work is in numerous institutional collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Cleveland Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annanale-on-Hudson, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Saint Louis Art Museum; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Modern, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; among others.
