Swiss-born artist Pamela Rosenkranz’s work embodies a foreboding view of the contemporary world and its central tenets. Her upcoming exhibition Our Product is no exception. Curated by Susanne Pfeffer as part of the 56th International Art Exhibition, la Biennale di Venezia, the show will transform the Swiss Pavilion into a flurry of pinkish white skin colour through the medium of visual art, sculpture, and sound.
Rosenkranz’s art usually functions as a mirror to the internet-driven thinking of her generation: she takes abstruse, often misunderstood issues and reduces them to easily understandable sets of symbols, which she brings to life through conceptually driven abstract sculptures, works on paper, videos, and installations. Her work revisits fundamental questions like ‘what does it mean to be human?’ and encourages meditation on how, and to what effect, the influence of contemporary culture has altered reality.
Our Product affronts visitors with the implications of an engineered nature as Rosenkranz reflects on the human subject in terms of fluidity, an association of composites generated from synthetic materials. She melds unfamiliar substances and textures such as acrylic, methylene, spandex, silicone, and titanium in a bid to draw parallels between the composition of things and that of humans in terms of their material reality and synthetic appearance. Unsurprisingly, Rosenkranz has been identified with the Speculative Realist school of philosophical thought. In 2012 she collaborated with Robin Mackay and Reza Negarestani, two of the movement’s most important thinkers as part of her critically acclaimed monographic catalogue No Core.
Rosenkranz was born in Uri, Switzerland in 1979. She received her MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts, Bern, in 2010, and completed an independent residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in 2012. In 2014 she was nominated for the Böttcherstraße Prize, Kunsthalle Bremen.
Pamela Rosenkranz, Our Product, 9 May – 22 November, 56th International Art Exhibition la Biennale di Venezia, Venice.
Find out more at www.labiennale.org.
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Credits
1. Pamela Rosenkranz, Bow Human, 2012, acrylic plaster, emergency blanket, vaseline. Courtesy of Miguel Abreu Gallery.
