Artists: Whitney Claflin and Rochelle Feinstein
Exhibition title: Stabler Horizon
Conceived in collaboration with: Fabrice Stroun
Venue: DREI, Cologne, Germany
Date: April 28 – June 18, 2022
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and DREI, Cologne
NY NOW. When looking at a two-person show, one might be tempted to compare and contrast, and draw art-historical generalizations, especially if both artists work in the same medium, come from the same town, and belong to two distinct generations. But in doing so, one would fail to take into account that both Rochelle Feinstein’s and Whitney Claflin’s solo shows already, from the outset, look like group exhibitions. As such, each individual work in this presentation might best be approached as a singular term in an open-ended rebus.
Even though both artists have worked throughout their careers in a wide variety of styles, materials and processes, their respective canvases are immediately recognizable as their own. As such, the sensation of polyphony is not so much generated by the forms as by the contents. If each and every one of their works can be said, across the board, to be more or less about painting, or rather about art-making, it is always also about something else. Here, a word play, there, an idea – and there, a feeling. Some works are grounded in private diaristic events that we, as viewers, are necessarily excluded from, while others are steeped in immediately recognizable, shared cultural realities. Each work (or relatively small body of works), thus creates its own interlocutors, strikes up its own conversation. This polyphony is underwritten by a poverty of means, i.e. a withholding of formal virtuosity or, in Rochelle Feinstein’s words, a “refusal to refine”, that is not, as is often the case, an expressionistic dandyism, so much as an indispensable precondition to maintain the work in a state of being permeable to the world – in which it exists and in which it is made.
While I am not sure what the show will be about – at least for me – until it is hung, I suspect that, in some measure, it will paint pictures of New York, a city that has been a beacon of advanced art-making in our collective imagination for generations. A picture of a city that is long past the decades-long stagnant ideological malaise that followed the relatively short-lived post-war triumphalism. A city that has become culturally and economically deeply inhospitable to its artists, and where the daily activity of making art has become a daily struggle. While these pictures can be grating, they are not so much bleak as resilient. Each canvas by either of these painters is animated by a wry, but also at times biting or bittersweet humor; they are, in Claflin’s words, “moments between raindrops”, generative of a potentially intense private exchange between the artist and the viewer. And, from one work to the next, emerge as the building-blocks of what being in the world together might look like.
-Fabrice Stroun, 2022
Whitney Claflin lives and works in New York. She graduated from the Yale School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut. The artist’s work recently had been on view in solo exhibitions at Bodega (now Derosia), New York (2021); Drei, Cologne; Soft Opening, London (both 2020); and Central Fine, Miami Beach (2019). She furthermore recently contributed to exhibitions at Sandy Brown, Berlin (2021); Shoot the Lobster, New York (2020); Galerie Buchholz, New York (2019); Croy Nielsen, Vienna; Greene Naftali, New York (both 2018) a.o.
Rochelle Feinstein lives and works in New York. This year saw a six-venue, international exhibition of new and historic work of hers at Galerie Francesca Pia, Zurich; Campoli Presti, Paris; Bridget Donahue and Candice Madey, both New York; Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles; and Nina Johnson, Miami. A major survey exhibition of Feinstein’s work originated at the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, and subsequently traveled to Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich; Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (all 2016), and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2018). Other solo exhibitions have taken place at Kunsthaus Baselland (2018) and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University (2012). Feinstein had been a professor for painting and printmaking at the Yale School of Art between 1994 and 2017. Her work is in museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Amorepacific Museum of Art, Seoul; Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich; the Pérez Art Museum, Miami; and the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum.
Fabrice Stroun is a curator and art writer. He currently teaches in the painting department of HEAD in Geneva.
Whitney Claflin and Rochelle Feinstein, Stabler Horizon, 2022, exhibition view, DREI, Cologne
Whitney Claflin and Rochelle Feinstein, Stabler Horizon, 2022, exhibition view, DREI, Cologne
Whitney Claflin and Rochelle Feinstein, Stabler Horizon, 2022, exhibition view, DREI, Cologne
Rochelle Feinstein, Golden Moments / Silver Linings, 2022, Polaroids, laminated, alligator clips on hand dyed yarn, embroidery floss on wire 185 × 20 × 6 cm
Whitney Claflin, One Star, 2022, Oil on wood panel, 20 × 25,5 cm
Whitney Claflin and Rochelle Feinstein, Stabler Horizon, 2022, exhibition view, DREI, Cologne
Whitney Claflin and Rochelle Feinstein, Stabler Horizon, 2022, exhibition view, DREI, Cologne
Whitney Claflin and Rochelle Feinstein, Stabler Horizon, 2022, exhibition view, DREI, Cologne
Rochelle Feinstein, Dawned / 1984, 2022, Acrylic, acrylic enamel spray paint, hand dyed yarn on cotton drop cloth 130 × 130 cm
Rochelle Feinstein, Sequel, 2022, Acrylic, acrylic enamel spray paint, hand dyed yarn on cotton drop cloth 130 × 130 cm
Whitney Claflin and Rochelle Feinstein, Stabler Horizon, 2022, exhibition view, DREI, Cologne
Whitney Claflin, Unclear, 2022, Oil, ink, glitter on linen, 23 × 30 cm
Whitney Claflin, Chore Chart, 2022, Oil, graphite, ink, colored pencil on canvas, 86 × 86 cm
Whitney Claflin, Neither Behemoth, 2022, Ink, collage on paper, 30 × 22,5 cm, 33,5 × 26 cm (framed)
Whitney Claflin, Union, 2022, Inkjet print on Avery labels, 28 × 21,5 cm, 31 × 25 cm (framed)
Whitney Claflin and Rochelle Feinstein, Stabler Horizon, 2022, exhibition view, DREI, Cologne
Whitney Claflin, A Crooked World, 2022, Oil on linen, 27,5 × 35,5 cm
Whitney Claflin and Rochelle Feinstein, Stabler Horizon, 2022, exhibition view, DREI, Cologne
Whitney Claflin and Rochelle Feinstein, Stabler Horizon, 2022, exhibition view, DREI, Cologne
Whitney Claflin, Monochrome, 2022, Oil on canvas, 28 × 35,5 cm
Whitney Claflin and Rochelle Feinstein, Stabler Horizon, 2022, exhibition view, DREI, Cologne
Whitney Claflin and Rochelle Feinstein, Stabler Horizon, 2022, exhibition view, DREI, Cologne
Rochelle Feinstein, Double Dawned / 2012, 2022, Acrylic, acrylic enamel spray paint, hand dyed yarn on cotton drop cloth 130 × 130 cm
Whitney Claflin and Rochelle Feinstein, Stabler Horizon, 2022, exhibition view, DREI, Cologne
Whitney Claflin and Rochelle Feinstein, Stabler Horizon, 2022, exhibition view, DREI, Cologne
Whitney Claflin, Aunts & Others, 2022, Oil on linen, 30,5 × 40,5 cm
Whitney Claflin, Speed Racer, 2022, Oil, ink, paper on linen, 40 × 30 cm
Whitney Claflin, Splinter and His Student, 2022, Oil on wood panel, 20,5 × 25,5 cm
Whitney Claflin, 13, 2022, Oil on cotton, 40,5 × 66 cm
Whitney Claflin, The Worst TV I Have Ever Owned, 2022, Oil on cotton, 22,5 × 30,5 cm
Whitney Claflin and Rochelle Feinstein, Stabler Horizon, 2022, exhibition view, DREI, Cologne
Whitney Claflin and Rochelle Feinstein, Stabler Horizon, 2022, exhibition view, DREI, Cologne
Rochelle Feinstein, American Sampler / 2020, 2022, Acrylic, acrylic enamel spray paint, hand dyed yarn on cotton 125 × 125 cm
Whitney Claflin and Rochelle Feinstein, Stabler Horizon, 2022, exhibition view, DREI, Cologne
Whitney Claflin, Krtkkarphillmuk, 2022, Oil, ink on canvas, 28 × 35,5 cm