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Rachel Urkowitz

40 Quai de Jemmapes75010, Paris

55 Bethune Street, #C915New York, NY 10014

[email protected]

Rachel Urkowitz

Born 1970, Chicago, Illinois. Lives and works in New York and Paris

Solo Exhibitions

2004 Permanent Foliage, Michael Steinberg Fine Art, New York, NY World of Plants (with Lisa Oppenheim), Catharine Clark Gallery, SF, CA2003 Flat Garden, Galerie Michael Neff, Frankfurt, Germany2002 White Room (Everything Must Go), White Columns, New York, NY1993 Penn Central, Maxwell’s, Hoboken, NJ1991 Utensils, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA

Selected Group Exhibitions/Screenings

2007 The Rotterdam International Film Festival, screening of Spirals, The Netherlands (catalog) Drawn In, curated by Marcy Freedman, The Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles, CA2006 New York Experimental: Botanicals, screening curated by Susan Agliata, The Tank, NY Transformative, Nathan Larramendy Gallery, Ojai, CA NeoImages Off-Axis, curated by Robert Heckes, NeoImages, Santa Barbara, CA Every Day Is Different, Michael Steinberg Fine Art, New York, NY NewYork Experimental: Animations, screening curated by Susan Agliata, The Tank, NY Like, 2 person show with Ryan Humphrey, curated by Sara Reisman, PS 122, NY (catalog) When Artists Say We, curated by Andrea Geyer and Christian Ratemayer, Artists Space, NY2005 Site Specifics ’05, the Carriage House at the Islip Art Museum, Islip NY (catalog) Selections from Michael Steinberg Fine Art, Bridgehampton, NY2004 Botany 12, Sonoma County Museum of Art, Santa Rosa, CA (catalog) World of Plants, Catherine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, CA FFFF (five friends film festival), organized by Olav Westphalen, Wilkinson Gallery, London Newpapers, Josée Bienvenue Gallery, New York, NY Happy Medium, curated by Meghan Dailey, Clementine Gallery, New York, NY Shape-Shifter, curated by Elissa Levy, Audio Engine, New York, NY Up and Coming, (w/Augusto Arbizo), Michael Steinberg Fine Art at ARCO, Madrid, Spain GO!, Liquidación Total, Madrid, Spain2003 Giverny, curated by Augusto Arbizo and Yvonne Force, Salon 94, New York, NY Hands up, Baby, Hands Up!, curated by Michael Neff, Oldenburger Kunstverein, Germany Transplants, curated by Peter Rostovsky, at The Brewster Project, Brewster, NY The Armory Show, Special Project for White Columns Gallery, New York, NY Recession 2003 $99 Show, Cynthia Broan Gallery, New York, NY2002 The Undertones, Ten in One Gallery, New York, NY Bring It On…, Big & Tall/Casual, Brooklyn, NY Tract: Systemic Sprawl, curated by Amanda Church, PlusUltra Gallery, Brooklyn, NY2001 Some (are) Painting, John Gibson Gallery, New York, NY World Without Ground, Chase Freedman Gallery, West Hartford, CT2000 Painting: Sara Kane, Jackie Saccoccio, Rachel Urkowitz, Thomas Erben Gallery, NY, NY Funny Girls, Galerie Michael Neff, Frankfurt, Germany Storage: Akiko Ichikawa/Rachel Urkowitz, Artists Space Independent Project (at Manhattan Mini Storage, Soho), New York, NY1998 Escapes: MFA Thesis Show, Times Square Gallery, Hunter College, New York, NY

Selected Grants/Residencies

2007 Drawing in Residence, selected by Marcy Freedman, in conjunction with Drawn In2002 9/11 Artist’s Residency, Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico2001 Artists at Giverny Program, Grant/Residency, France: curated by Art Production Fund, NY, NY

Doubts About the Deluge2006

Coloraid on paper and foamcore, 2 parts72 x 72 x 3 inches

Doubts About the Deluge (detail)2006

Coloraid on paper and foamcore, 2 parts72 x 72 x 3 inches

Like at PS 122, installation view2006

from left to right: Double Spirals, Split WaveDoubts About the Deluge, Arch

Double Spirals2006

Coloraid on paper and boardEach Spiral: 9 x 9 x 1 inches

Split Wave2006

Coloraid on foamcore and PVC pipes42 x 46 x 28 inches

Spirals2006

8mm stop-motion animation transferred to video3 minutes 48 seconds

Spirals

A stop-motion animation involving various spirals in my studio, in the process of creation, destruction and interaction. A piece of string on a cluttered table turns itself into a spiral and rolls into another world. Mayhem ensues. Battles. Explosions. A bucolic ending. The verdant after-effects: trudging off into the greenery, alone, but transformed.

Vertical Greensward (installation view)2005

Coloraid, paper and foamcore sculptures on acrylic platformoverall dimensions: 35 feet long x 48 x 60 inches

Vertical Greensward

Vertical Greensward is a fence made of oversized blades of grass. Each paper sculpture bears marks of individuality, contra-dicting the idea of grass as something anonymous, underfoot and overlooked. The reflective platform further sets it apart from its surroundings, and also doubles the blades in a shadowy reflection. The installation blocked access from one part of the museum to the other, forcing the viewers to exit the building to see the rest of the exhibition. The title references Frederick Law Olmstead’s original design for Central Park in New York City, called “the Greensward Project.”

Vertical Greensward (installation view)2005


Vertical Greensward (detail)2005


Vertical Greensward (detail)2005

Coloraid, paper and foamcore sculptures on acrylic platformsmall clump of grass: 7 x 3 x 4 inches

World of Plants(Collaboration with Lisa Oppenheim)

2004 8mm and 16mm film transferred to video, sound

2.54 minutes

World of Plants

A non-music video of sorts, “World of Plants” was shot in the greenhouse of the same name during the New York Botani-cal Garden Orchid Show. The sound was recorded at the Winter Garden mall in the World Financial Center. The disparate sound and image sources provoke an examination of nature as contained and contextualized within highly developed commercial and cultural spaces.

Spectrum Drawing: All the colors that fitMay 14, 2006

watercolor and ink on paper5 x 7 inches

Spectrum Drawings

Each watercolor, made using a set of paints I have had since I was a child, completes a task I set at the beginning of the drawing. These range from conventional color studies to a personal idea about a whole era, to a process dictated by the limitations of the paintbox. The drawing is completed in one sitting. This ongoing series currently has over 40 drawings.

Spectrum Drawing: Hot and ColdJune 5, 2006

Watercolor and ink on paper5 x 7 inches

Spectrum Drawing: Each color inside and outside of Green 1June 6, 2006


Spectrum Drawing: 24 GreensJuly 19, 2006


Spectrum Drawing: Chromatic Circular ProgressionJune 15, 2006


Spectrum Drawing: The 70’sAugust 10, 2006


“Was Find Ich In Den Alpen?” Daily Flower DrawingsCarlina acaulis

November 22, 2005Ink on Paper

11 x 8.5 inches

The tourists are everywhere - you’re not going to be able to walk down the street soon.

“Was Find Ich In Den Alpen?” Daily Flower Drawings

These drawings mark the specific time in which they were made, using radio broadcasts and a field guide to a place I have never been. I draw a flower from an illustrated guidebook to the alps while listening to the news on the radio. I record a quote from the radio while drawing the picture. Two sysems that bring distant minutiae (tiny alpine flowers and snippets of newsworthy information) into my view are mapped onto each other. This is an ongoing series of drawings.

“Was Find Ich In Den Alpen?” Daily Flower DrawingsPirola uniflora


11 x 8.5 inches

The world is probably a lot closer to an international flu pandemic than its been in the last 30 years.

“Was Find Ich In Den Alpen?” Daily Flower DrawingsHieracium aurantiacum


11 x 8.5 inches

Sierra Leone is not an easy tourism sell...

“Was Find Ich In Den Alpen?” Daily Flower DrawingsPhyteuma pauciflorum

October 25, 2005Ink on Paper

11 x 8.5 inches

“You’re not going to get the monkey for free. You have to pay for the monkey.” Jerry Lewis on “Fresh Air”

“Was Find Ich In Den Alpen?” Daily Flower DrawingsConvallaria majalis

September 30, 2005Ink on Paper

11 x 8.5 inches

V.P. Cheney goes about his business without much regard to the press.

Permanent Foliage 2004

Acrylic flowers, paper wall sculptures and collages Installation view at Michael Steinberg Fine Art, NY

Permanent Foliage

Solo show at Michael Steinberg Fine Art, NY. Modular Flower Sculptures and “Flying Buttresses” and wall-based three dimensional collages.

Twist2004

Coloraid on paper30 x 32 x 4 inches

Invasive (Inversion)2003

Coloraid on paper45 x 36 inches

Far Flung2004

Coloraid on paper and foamcore42 x 35 x 2.5 inches

Far Flung (detail)2004

Coloraid on paper and foamcore42 x 35 x 2.5 inches

Small Acrylic Flower2004

Laser cut acrylic36 x 20 inches

Flying Buttress 12004

Laser cut acrylic, 12 parts 48 x 39 x 37 inches

Bittersweet2004


Clench2004


Paper Mum, Real Mum 2001c print

5 x 7 inchesedition of 10

Giverny Replacement Project

During a residency at Monet’s Garden in Giverny I decided to try to replace all the real flowers with paper models of the same, in an attempt to make the gardener’s jobs a little easier. This is the documentation of one of the models in situ, in the Chrysantamum bush on the main walk of the garden.

Paper flowers, Giverny Models2001-2002

Papereach flower approx. 12 x 4 inches

Prototypes for Giverny Replacement Projectand for acrylic flowers

Transplants at the Brewster Project2003

Large acrylic flower with small paper flowers (dog-robot scuptures by Steve Robinson) Paper Flowers: 7 x 2.5 inches each

Transplants at The Brewster Project: Do-It-Yourself Flowers

The Breswster project is a three day art event in a small town in Upstate Sew York. Artists are invited to create a piece for non-art sites. This piece was in teh waiting area of a taxi dispatch storefront. While clients waited for their taxi, they could make a flower or two and either add it to the installation or take it with them. In this way, the piece grew and changed over the three days of the show.

Show Me the MonetRachel Urkowitz

Appearances can be deceiving. In “The Language of Flowers”, George Bataille says “…the flower is betrayed by the fragility of its corolla: thus far from answering the demands of human ideas, it is the sign of their failure. In fact, after a very short period of glory the marvelous corolla rots indecently in the sun, thus becoming, for the plant, a garish withering…flowers wither like old and overly made-up dowagers, and they die ridiculously on stems that seemed to carry them to the clouds…Don’t all these beautiful things run the risk of being reduced to a strange mise en scène, destined to make sacrilege more impure?” (Georges Bataille, “The Language of Flowers” )

Every year, hordes of tourists visit Claude Monet’s Garden in Giverny, France. Monet lived in the house in Giverny from 1883 until his death in 1926. He painted the giant water lily “Decorations” in “…the restored Waterlily Studio, now home to the Monet Foundation shop.”1 Life-sized photographic reproductions of Monet’s paintings decorate the shop, which one must pass through to exit the museum. The gardens themselves are exquisitely beautiful, and, “restored to their original state, [they] now offer the visitor that “painting made from Nature itself” that Monet’s contemporaries regarded as one of his masterpieces.”2

As with all successful tourist attractions, the inner workings of Giverny are well hidden from the public. The visitor walks through the lush, color-coded gardens with the sense that this day must be the perfect time to be there, since everything is blooming, nothing is dying, and remarkably, there are not too many bugs, even around the lily pond, where you might expect thousands of mosquitoes. The water lilies, too, seem to be growing just where they were when Monet painted them. As they move from glorious vista to glorious vista, many tourists exclaim, “It looks just like the paintings!”

What is hidden from view is the complex, meticulously planned display, orchestrated by the head gardener, Gilbert Vahé, and the head of the Fondation Claude Monet, Gerald Van Der Kemp. Every two weeks, according to Van Der Kemp, the flowers are “changed.” This means that during the week the gardeners weed out any flowers displaying the least sign of “garish withering” and pile them out of sight of the public. On Monday, when the garden is closed, the gardeners replace all those dead flowers with brand new blossoms, some of which are grown in greenhouses on the property, many of which are purchased from a large, industrial-sized nursery a few towns away. Thus, the whiff of death never approaches the garden path or disturbs the pure enjoyment of the re-creation of an Impression.

The insects are dealt with through liberal spraying of insecticides early in the morning every week or so. The gardeners wielding the sprayers are fully protected by gas masks, but some unfortunate birds occasionally get caught in the line of fire and drop from the trees. A dead bird can ruin the illusion of constantly budding life, so a few young gardeners patrol the paths during business hours, just to be safe.

The water lilies themselves posed the greatest challenge in terms of the restoration, according to Vahé. In the 1920s, beaver coats were all the rage in France. Beavers were imported to the waters of the Seine to supply an insatiable demand for American Brute Couture. The animals, it turned out, had a taste for water lily roots, and when the fad died out, the unchecked beaver population decimated Monet’s lily pond. Vahé solved the problem of hungry beavers by planting the lilies in cement planters, which also allowed him to place them just so. Thus are the gardens of the past protected, preserved, and saved from the ravages of exposure and small animals, and reduced to a picture perfect mise en scène.

� Giverny website; www.fondation-monet.com2 Ibid

This article originally appeared in Cabinet Magazine #6, the Horticulture issue: http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/6/

Flat Garden 2003

Acrylic flowers, paper wall sculptures and collages Large Flowers: 54 x 29 inches Small Flowers: 36 x 20 inches

Installation view at Galerie Michael Neff, Frankfurt

Flat Garden

Solo exhibition at Galerie Michael Neff in Frankfurt. A panorama of wall-based collages and a field of flowers.

Everything Must Go 2003

Coloraid on papercorner installation: 108 x 72 x 48 inches

Silent2003

8mm stop-motion animation (transferred to DVD)3 minutes

Silent

This 8mm stop-motion film animation was done entirely with natural light, and the passage of time is revealed as the sunlight moves quickly across the paper. Small pieces of colored paper move and transform in a quasi-narrative of creation, destruction, chase and rhythm. The paper “actors” in the animation were eventually used to create a series of “film stills” that accompanied the animation.

Dream Drawing 12003-2006

Pencil and ink on paper11 x 14 inches

Dream Drawings

This is an ongoing series in which I try to draw certain of my dreams. I am interested in the gap between the image as it appears during sleep, as a sort of private movie, and the telling of the dream; similar to the gap between seeing and description, or between experience in the moment and memory. This is the same space that is opened up by abstraction, when objects seem to be something, but not quite. It is this moment just before the apprehension of the thing that fascinates me, and that dreams exemplify.

Bibliography

Catalogs2007 Rotterdam International Film Festival Catalog2006 PS 122 Classroom Gallery Painting Series Brochure; text by Sara Reisman2005 Site Specifics ’05 at the Islip Art Museum: catalog text by Karen Shaw2004 Botany 12, Sonoma County Museum of Art, catalog text by Natasha Boas

Articles/Reviews2006 Transformative, Santa Barbara Magazine2005 Site Specifics ’05, The New York Times Merrily Kerr, “New Paper Sculpture”, Art on Paper2004 George Snyder, “Garden of Artistic Delights”, San Francisco Chronicle Rick Polito, Marin Independent Journal, “A Sense of Place” M.V. Wood, “Secret Life of Paint”, North Bay Bohemian Dan Taylor, “Touch of Artistry”, The Press Democrat “NewPapers” review, Time Out New York, July Ken Johnson, “Permanent Foliage”, The New York Times “Permanent Foliage” Time Out New York Alan Lockwood, Summer Art Guide, NYPress Brian Sholis, ArtForum.com, “Happy Medium”2003 The New York Times, “Giverny” The New Yorker, “Giverny” New York Magazine, “Giverny” John Reed, “Giverny” Time Out New York David Cohen, “Giverny” The New York Sun The Art Newspaper, “Giverny” Ken Johnson, “The Undertones” The New York Times 2002 Ken Johnson, “TRACT: Systemic Sprawl”, The New York Times Sarah Schmerler, “TRACT: Systemic Sprawl”, Time Out New York “TRACT: Systemic Sprawl”, The New Yorker “White Room: Rachel Urkowitz,” Critic’s Pick, Time Out New York 2001 Ken Johnson, “Some (are) Painting”, The New York Times Ken Johnson, “Painting/not Painting”, The New York Times 2000 Meghan Dailey, “Painting: Sara Kane, Jackie Saccoccio, Rachel Urkowitz”, Time Out New York Nikolaus Jungwirth, “Heiter und bunt sei die Kunst”, Frankfurter Rundschau Konstanze Crüwell, “Dame in Grau und heitieres Farbenchaos” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Publications/Lectures by the artist2006 Artist’s talk/Panel discussion in conjunction with “Like”2005 Collector’s Circle, artist’s talk2003/04 Yale University Graduate School of Architecture: guest critic/visiting artist2002 “Show Me The Monet”, article/artist’s project, Cabinet Magazine #62002 Smith College: Visiting Artist/Digital Bookmaking workshop2002 Bennington July Program: Visiting Artist Lecture/Digital Bookmaking workshop 2000 “Diana Cooper” (review), Art&Text, February-April, 2000 “The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art” CitiSearch.com “Lightning Field Memory Project,” Cabinet Magazine #3

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