Artist: Libby Rothfeld
Exhibition title: Noon and Afternoon
Venue: Bureau, New York, US
Date: November 5 – December 17, 2017
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Bureau, New York
Bureau is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Libby Rothfeld, the artist’s first with the gallery, following AAa:Quien with Erica Baum this past January. For Noon and Afternoon, Rothfeld debuts a new group of sculptures and wall works composed of readymade and handmade objects, deliberately altered into unsettling amalgams. Throughout the exhibition, water bottles—some half-filled, some empty, all ultimately abandoned—rest on weathered laminate surfaces. Nondescript clothing, preserved in plastic, drapes and hangs over furniture-like constructions. Wall works, taped and chipped, support discarded papers, even more plastic bottles, academic figure renderings, printed images, scribbles, and appropriated doodles. Nearby hang handmade masks marking the evolutionary phase of homo sapiens, some paired with blown-up snapshots and hats.
Caught in a kind of purgatory, the many elements comprising the show waver between arbitrary placement and specific motive. Through combinations of real and made, preserved and discarded, historical and banal, Rothfeld constructs situations and juxtapositions that dispense with hierarchies– as objects and materials are liberated from their ordinary function. The drawings, masks, photographs and structures cast the hand’s application as anything but a game of chance. In placing gestures and objects on the same platform their values and identities are disassembled; unravelling aesthetic and fundamental assumptions and surrendering to a language of logic and symbol. Rothfeld’s work incites the viewer to question why this and not that when we know very well there are no answers.
Libby Rothfeld (b. 1990, New Brunswick, New Jersey; lives and works in New York) received her BFA from New York University. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include, 1999, Antoine Renard & Libby Rothfeld, curated by Siliqoon, Marsèlleria, Milan; A Dumb Sound, A Sweet Bell, Anne Libby & Libby Rothfeld, 315 Gallery, Brooklyn; AAa:Quien, Bureau, New York; Libby Rothfeld, First Continent, Baltimore; and Good To Think With, Good To Think Against, Kimberly-Klark, New York. Group exhibitions include Homestead, Carl Louie, London, Ontario; In The Hopes of Not Being Considered, Kate Werble Gallery, New York; Boil the Ocean, Bodega, New York; Daydream 2013, Canada, New York; Welcome to Earth, The Story So Far…, High Tide, Philadelphia; 2000, Sydney-Sydney, Sydney, Australia. Rothfeld has had residencies at Siliqoon, Milan, Italy; Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, New York; OxBow, Saugatuck, Michigan, and Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, New York. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, Sex Magazine Sorry Archive and others.
Libby Rothfeld, Noon and Afternoon, 2017, exhibition view, Bureau, New York
Libby Rothfeld, Noon and Afternoon, 2017, exhibition view, Bureau, New York
Libby Rothfeld, Noon and Afternoon, 2017, exhibition view, Bureau, New York
Libby Rothfeld, Noon and Afternoon, 2017, exhibition view, Bureau, New York
Libby Rothfeld, Noon and Afternoon, 2017, exhibition view, Bureau, New York
Libby Rothfeld, Noon and Afternoon, 2017, exhibition view, Bureau, New York
Libby Rothfeld, Bulletin Board #2, 2017, Laminate, water bottles, clay, tape, ceramic dishes, sharpie, inkjet print, plexi, pencil, 30 × 54 ¼ × 4 ¾ inches
Libby Rothfeld, Chair / System, 2017, Laminate, clothing, plastic bags, hangers, water bottles, 39 × 31 × 18 ¼ inches
Libby Rothfeld, Untitled (Two Masks), 2017, Ultracal cast from ceramic, 14 × 25 × 4 inches
Libby Rothfeld, Untitled (Mask and Hat), 2017, Ultracal cast from ceramic, hat, 13 × 29 × 3 ½ inches
Libby Rothfeld, Bulletin Board #1, 2017, Laminate, water bottle, UV plexi prints, charcoal, tape, paper, thumb tack, 37 × 37 ½ × 5 inches
Libby Rothfeld, Hand (Mask), 2017, Vinyl print, ultracal cast from ceramic, 48 × 36 × 4 ½ inches
