Rachel Feinstein

I’ve always been interested in portraying some kind of fantasy, then showing that it’s completely constructed. There are always dark messages hidden behind beauty, and the act of sculpting is about listening to that inner voice that warns you about something lurking beneath the surface. —Rachel Feinstein In richly detailed sculptures and multipart installations, Rachel Feinstein investigates and challenges the concept of luxury as it was expressed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, in the context of contemporary parallels. By synthesizing visual and societal opposites such as romance and pornography, elegance and kitsch, and the marvelous and the banal, she explores issues of taste and desire. Born in Fort Defiance, Arizona, and raised in Miami, Feinstein received a BA in 1993 from Columbia University, New York, where she studied religion, philosophy, and studio art. That same year she attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, Maine. She found her passion for sculpture under the influence of mentors such as Judy Pfaff, Ursula von Rydingsvard, and Kiki Smith. In 1994 Feinstein was included in several group shows in New York, including Let the Artist Live! at Exit Art, where she presented a large gingerbread house, modeled after Sleeping Beauty’s castle, in which she slept throughout the exhibition. Feinstein’s work was included in the first iteration of MoMA PS1’s Greater New York in 2000. She had her first solo exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, the following year, showing large plaster and wood sculptures of lions, swans, angels, and waterfalls, and transforming one of the galleries into an all-white Rococo-style salon inspired by imperial palaces in Munich and Vienna. The construction of fantastical, multidimensional environments is integral to Feinstein’s practice. Preferring to see her work in complex interiors, she often brings Baroque elements into exhibition spaces, complicating the relationship between sculpture and painting, positive and negative space. The sculptures seem to flatten when viewed from certain angles, while the walls appear to expand through Feinstein’s use of mirrors and wallpaper. After seeing her ornate sculptures reflected in her paintings on mirrors from the early 2000s, Feinstein began to explore spatial landscapes, notably those depicted in panoramas from the 1800s. Using found images, she created hybrid arcadian landscapes printed on mirrored wallpaper. The first of these wallpapers, Panorama of Rome (2012), was installed in the elliptical gallery at Gagosian, Rome, and offered visitors an impressionistic view of the city around them. In 2010–11 Feinstein transformed the modernist interior of Lever House, New York, into a snowy wonderland rife with stylized elements of Rococo and Gothic design. Interpreting Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen , she created a gilded carriage, groups of toy soldiers, arched alcoves that housed characters from the story, and sublime architectural ruins painted onto floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Three years later her sculpture Folly (2014) was installed in New York’s Madison Square Park, marking Feinstein’s first public art exhibition in the United States. In 2018 Feinstein produced the Secrets series, which includes eight large-scale sculptures that reimagine the Victoria’s Secret “Angels,” as well as ceramic sculptures inspired by Franz Anton Bustelli’s Rococo commedia dell’arte figurines. As in much of her work, the theatrical and the intricate verge on the grotesque to become strangely erotic abstractions that suggest the body through its absence. Feinstein’s first career survey, Maiden, Mother, Crone at the Jewish Museum, New York (2019–21), presented three decades of her sculptures, paintings, and videos and was accompanied by a major monograph. Titled after three consequential stages in a woman’s life, the exhibition traced her investigations of masculinity and femininity, balance and precariousness. First exhibited in 2022, the Mirror series comprises oil paintings on mirror supports that reference sixteenth-century sculptural altarpieces. Interpreting the altarpieces’ carved wooden forms, Feinstein leaves her figures’ eyes unpainted, evoking in the viewer an uncanny sense of becoming one with each painting. In 2023, Feinstein’s exhibition Façade at the Savannah College of Art and Design’s Museum of Art in Georgia, featured her painted panoramas, large-scale sculptures, and wall reliefs in a multidimensional installation that shifted between reality and illusion. That same year, Feinstein’s sculptures and paintings were exhibited in dialogue with Renaissance and Baroque masterworks from the collections of three museums in Florence, Italy: Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Museo Stefano Bardini, and Museo Marino Marini. Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years (2024–25) at the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, Florida, is her first major exhibition in her hometown.