RACHEL ROSE

Featuring 13 new works, Rose reimagines the Flight into Egypt through Mary’s singular perspective, tracing a suspended day from dawn to night

Gladstone is pleased to announce The Rest, an exhibition of new paintings by Rachel Rose. Presented at our 64th Street gallery, this body of work expands upon the artist’s past investigations into the relationship between storytelling, landscape, and the structuring of our belief systems.

Rose here addresses the canon of devotional paintings that depict the biblical allegory of the holy family’s flight to Egypt. Illustrating a pause in the journey of Mary, Joseph, and the newborn Jesus as they escape the threat of King Herod, these images typically conflate the natural world with indications of serenity, danger, or the miraculous, situating the story’s protagonists in a world driven by symbolism.

For The Rest, Rose has chosen to address this moment exclusively from the perspective of Mary, depopulating the picture plane and extracting all imagery extraneous to this point of view. Rather than appropriate details from these canonical paintings, Rose has instead resituated the scene to reflect a pastoral New York landscape. Through this lens, we see the edge of a forest, the drift of clouds passing through the sky or over a moon, the prismatic refraction of the sun’s light, branches bending towards the earth. The fourteen paintings included in the series expand this moment to a full day, charting the shift from dawn to morning, afternoon to dusk, and dusk to night.

In these works, Rose’s smearing, blurring, and flashes of focus suggest that the suspension of time is as much a subject of painting as is the landscape. In the history of this apocryphal moment, Mary is often seated breastfeeding her baby. The world pauses and warps for her. Rose’s technique in the depiction of nature, to envision it as bleeding and yielding, reveals how the Virgin Mary might have experienced it in the moment. The paintings are an expression of the unconscious state of non-time we might enter when guarding, protecting, or loving. The Rest is an abbreviation of the longer, commonly used title invoked across Europe for centuries, from Rembrandt to Patinir. The original title is descriptive yet vague. What does “the rest” mean? Under the influence of some kind of magic, evoked by some kind of love, mother and child find repose, alluding to a moment when time stops and the universe intervenes. Nature reflects these powers at work, presenting the surreality latent in the natural world.