Rachel Rose
Pitch Black Verdigris Green, 2022
Pitch Black Verdigris Green, 2022
Installation view: The Ecologies of Peace II. Work from the TBA21 Collection, Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía C3A, Córdoba, Spain, 2024
Photo: Imagen Subliminal (Rocío Romero y Miguel de Guzmán)
Photo: Imagen Subliminal (Rocío Romero y Miguel de Guzmán)
Collection
Color pigment, metallic powders, and oil on canvas
70.2 x 59.5 x 4.4 cm (framed)
TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection
In Pitch Black Verdigris Green, Rachel Rose layers black and verdigris pigments to conjure an eerie, meditative atmosphere, imbuing the painted landscape with profound symbolic weight. Drawing on historical references, Rose begins by scanning and digitally manipulating a photograph Ferdinand Keller’s painting Böcklin’s Grave (1901–02), an homage to the Swiss symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin. This spectral image forms the foundation of Rose’s canvas, accentuating the tension between the brooding blackness and the verdigris—a color associated with slow, inevitable decay. Where Keller’s painting memorialized the death of a single individual, Rose mourns something greater: the earth and nature itself.
The recurring motif of blackness encroaching onto the natural world draws a direct link to Rose’s video Enclosure(2019), where she envisions a haunting black orb, equal in size to the sun, slowly replacing the sun itself. This orb symbolizes the historical shift from agrarian societies, reliant on the sun for sustenance and timekeeping, to industrial societies governed by the clock and capital. As the orb moves across the sky, it leaves behind a dark, inky trail, marking mankind’s dark fate.
Tapping into humanity’s longstanding obsession with night and darkness—myths of shadow and dark catastrophe, of night as both abductor and oracle— Rose’s work probes deep into myth and history. In it, blackness is not merely material or metaphor, but becomes a space for revelation, where signs of disaster, transformation, and sacred mysteries emerge. However, Rose deconstructs the magical, stripping it of transformative meanings: what remains is prophecy without transcendence, the sacred without law, the miraculous without belief. What remains are fractured visions of an impending collapse, offering a stark meditation on the uncertainty of the future.
Born in New York, USA, in 1986. Lives and works in New York, USA.
70.2 x 59.5 x 4.4 cm (framed)
TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection
In Pitch Black Verdigris Green, Rachel Rose layers black and verdigris pigments to conjure an eerie, meditative atmosphere, imbuing the painted landscape with profound symbolic weight. Drawing on historical references, Rose begins by scanning and digitally manipulating a photograph Ferdinand Keller’s painting Böcklin’s Grave (1901–02), an homage to the Swiss symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin. This spectral image forms the foundation of Rose’s canvas, accentuating the tension between the brooding blackness and the verdigris—a color associated with slow, inevitable decay. Where Keller’s painting memorialized the death of a single individual, Rose mourns something greater: the earth and nature itself.
The recurring motif of blackness encroaching onto the natural world draws a direct link to Rose’s video Enclosure(2019), where she envisions a haunting black orb, equal in size to the sun, slowly replacing the sun itself. This orb symbolizes the historical shift from agrarian societies, reliant on the sun for sustenance and timekeeping, to industrial societies governed by the clock and capital. As the orb moves across the sky, it leaves behind a dark, inky trail, marking mankind’s dark fate.
Tapping into humanity’s longstanding obsession with night and darkness—myths of shadow and dark catastrophe, of night as both abductor and oracle— Rose’s work probes deep into myth and history. In it, blackness is not merely material or metaphor, but becomes a space for revelation, where signs of disaster, transformation, and sacred mysteries emerge. However, Rose deconstructs the magical, stripping it of transformative meanings: what remains is prophecy without transcendence, the sacred without law, the miraculous without belief. What remains are fractured visions of an impending collapse, offering a stark meditation on the uncertainty of the future.
Born in New York, USA, in 1986. Lives and works in New York, USA.