07/07/2015
Tina Plokarz wrote this lovely review of Rachel Gross's work now on display in the gallery.
Review – Rachel Gross: Panels and Works on Paper
In her solo exhibition at Hooloon Art, the printmaking artist Rachel Gross presents a clearly geometric, sensitively colored and poetic collection of prints, reliefs and collages. The subtle quality of her works and the balanced installation of the show “Panels and Works on Paper”, curated by Jennifer Zarro, is in its beautiful simplicity remarkable. Gross’ pieces create a unique illusion of space through perspectives on the surface of paper, panels and in three-dimensional reliefs. In a well-composed rhythm, she alternates delicate prints on paper, collages of forms and magazines strips as well as wall-objects of multiple assembled panels on the gallery walls. Rachel Gross’ artistic idea seems both evident and striking: how to construct an illusion of space.
In a duet of the two prints “Pink Box” and “Lambent Rim,” Gross unfolds spatial illusion on paper: She prints multiple shaped plates on paper and allows the plates’ peculiar wooden structure to be visible. Playing with different transparencies of silver color, she overlaps forms and partly illuminates occurring edges with fluorescent color in pink and orange. As Gross suggests: “The illusion of space and volume can be made by juxtaposing shapes, colors, and textures.“ And indeed, on the surface of paper, using geometrical forms, chatoyant facets of colors and densities, she creates an illusion which pulls the viewer in the depths of connected and unconnected shapes and lines of perspective. A contradiction of geometric order and disorientation deliberately occupies space in Gross’ prints which is reminiscent of Giovanni B. Piranesi’s labyrinths.
Like facets of a form, Rachel Gross’ wooden plates generate a double application in the exhibition. The shaped plates become the templates for her prints. On the other hand, as isolated panels the wooden forms develop into independent reliefs in which Gross assembles wooden surfaces and painted forms next to each other and arranges them in non-figurative configurations. Not only the juxtapositions on the wall, but also the apparently accidental quality of Gross’ creations, reminds one of the surrealist and abstract artist Hans Arp. However, the real challenge of Gross’ work is the oscillation between the limits of painting and sculpture. The material quality of the panels literally designates the reliefs as sculptural objects, whereas the colored shapes and painted forms become the pictorial medium of her work. In reference to an ongoing dialogue about pictorial sculpture and the objecthood of painting, the panel reliefs seem to develop into paintings with a delicate quality of sculpture and tangible illusion of space.
Undoubtedly, Rachel Gross’ collages also reflect this quality of ‘in-between’. On wood panels as well as on paper, she interconnects images of architecture with pictures of design forming slightly three-dimensional collages. In the paper composition “Gone the Rainbow,” for example, Gross combines shades of brown shapes, colorizes forms in green, brown and black, and embeds within the design a fifty’s-style magazine cut-out. The way in which the illustration of a living room arrangement (couch and artwork) interacts with the geometrical forms, Gross combines an interlocking design with an architectural sense of space.
Rachel Gross’ works at Hooloon Art shouldn’t be missed this summer. Both, her “Panels and Works on Paper” illuminate the possibilities of space and the exhibition reaches an exceptional and irresistible beauty of simplicity.
By Tina Plokarz
