Kay Rosen. NOW AND THEN
Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, Bremen, Germany
November 17, 2023 – March 31, 2024
The Weserburg Museum of Modern Art in Bremen is pleased to present Kay Rosen. NOW AND THEN, the artist's first institutional solo exhibition in Europe. Ever since the 1970s, Kay Rosen has been using language as artistic material. She is internationally known for her site-responsive wall works that render individual words, sentences, or series of letters, often in massive dimensions. The works in this presentation showcase her unique sensibility to minimalist forms, aesthetic impact, and rhetorical expression.
Whether climate crisis, AIDS, gender issues or the relationship between power, self-empowerment and powerlessness, Rosen's works are permeated by political themes and pointed reflections on current debates. However, her emphasis remains motivated not by politics but by language itself, and a constant search for new interconnections between image, word, and script. For this purpose, Rosen engages multifaceted visual and typographical strategies that extend a bridge between the disciplines of the visual arts, literature and poetry. In this endeavor, she takes delight in breaking rules, revealing levels of visual and linguistics ambiguity with incisive levity and seductive wittiness.
The exhibition in Bremen brings together around forty works, including several large-format wall works, paintings, drawings, prints and videos. On view in addition to exemplary major works is a new, six-part language picture developed specifically for the space of the museum.
NOW AND THEN is curated by Ingo Clauß and will be on view November 17, 2023, through March 31, 2024. An catalogue for the exhibition will be published December 2023. To learn more, click here.