Artist: Michal Rovner
Title: One-Person Game Against Nature II, #V2
Year created: 1992-93
Medium: Archival Chromogenic Color Print
Edition: One-Person Game Against Nature II, #V2
Framed Dimensions: 32” height x 42” width x 1-1/4” depth
Artwork Dimensions: 30” height x 40” width
This piece is framed.
Description of piece:
Ethereal and enigmatic, acclaimed photographer Michal Rovner’s original, large-format chromogenic color photographic work lends a soothing and poetic presence.
An early work by Rovner, and highly collectible, this beautiful image is from Rovner’s series One-Person Game Against Nature, and is titled: One-Person Game Against Nature ll, #V2. Rovner created the image in 1992, with the original museum-quality chromogenic color print made in 1993.
Measuring 32” in height x 42” width x 1-1/4” depth in its substantial frame of brushed steel, with non-glare museum glass, this masterful work examines the themes of spirituality, transcendence and change that permeate Rovner’s work.
The artist photographed people floating in the Dead Sea at dusk, then manipulated the images on her computer, changing the colors to vivid monochromatic tones, and abstracting the figures to an almost unrecognizable extent. “[Hovering] on the brink of visibility and existence”, as the New York Times described them, her figures embody an ambiguity and meditative spirit.
One-Person Game Against Nature ll, #V2 is accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity.
“Michal Rovner’s work shifts between the poetic and the political to explore questions of nature, identity, dislocation, and the fragility of human existence.”
Artist bio:
MICHAL ROVNER’s early work is characterized by the distortion of color and blurring of imagery. Exemplified by the series Outside (1990–91), featured in her first major museum show Outside: Michal Rovner, Works 1987–1990, at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 1990, and Decoy (1991), Rovner abstracted the specificity of her captured images through a process of reprinting.
Rovner’s One-Person Game Against Nature (1992-93) was featured in New Photography 10 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. By the late 1990s her blurred figures coalesced into migrating crowds in dream-like worlds, using cyclical repetition and duration as a device.
In the decade to follow, Rovner’s video work (incorporated into her practice in 1992) began taking cues from expanded cinema, collaborating with composer Philip Glass in Notes (2001). She received a mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 2002, which featured her multichannel video work Time Left (2002). This work was presented again the following year at the Venice Biennale where she was selected to represent Israel with the multi-faceted exhibition Against Order? Against Disorder? (2003).
Rovner became fascinated with the way geological objects— especially altered with human markings— telegraph history into the present and future and began merging video with sculpture through projection, as in her exhibition In Stone (2004), and in 2006 Rovner began introducing site-specific and archeologically driven work into her practice.
Rovner reinterprets historical memory and contemporary themes through her multimedia practice, in which she employs drawing, printmaking, video, sculpture, and installation. By recording and erasing visual information, where specifics of time and place are obscured, her works become gestural, layered, and abstract reflections on the continuum of human experience.
Born in Tel Aviv in 1957, Rovner studied at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Tel Aviv University. She has exhibited widely, including shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, where she also participated in their 2000 Biennial exhibit; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Rovner has divided her time between Israel and New York since 1988. Rovner’s photographs are in the permanent collections of museums throughout the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Contemporary Photography; and the Guggenheim.
