As a sculptor Rachel Harrison’s images penetrate the world at large like suspended dreams, or novels missing their last chapters, whether those images are half-figurative, half-standing-stone monoliths or fuzzy, immediately gripping and finally unreadable color drawings of a late Amy Winehouse keeping company with Picasso and De Kooning—as muse, collaborator, or judge, you can’t tell. Born in New York in 1966, now living in Brooklyn, Harrison had her first solo exhibition in 1996; her recent exhibitions “The Help” (2012), “Fake Titel” (2013), “Who Gave You This Number?” (2014) and “Three Young Framers” (2015), where “standing stick figures” all named Studs are placed inside a gallery remade into what looks like a maximum security prison, create atmospheres out of tangible objects that don’t hold still. Harrison’s work is funny, threatening, swirling even at its most solid, and most of all unpredictable. “With Harrison,” the critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote in a 2014 profile in the New Yorker, “there is no more postmodernism but a nameless epoch that starts now.”
Image Credit:
Rachel Harrison
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 2007 (detail)
Mannequin, platinum silicone Dick Cheney mask, cornstarch biodegradable packing peanuts, Flo-Pak regular and heavy-duty packing peanuts, eyeglasses, and athletic wear
67 x 90 x 33 inches
Courtesy of the Artist and Greene Naftali, New York
