Rosa Loy “Everything Stays Different”

Lyles & King

poster for Rosa Loy “Everything Stays Different”

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Lyles & King presents a solo exhibition of new paintings by the Leipzig-based artist Rosa Loy, Everything Stays Different. This will be her first solo exhibition with the gallery and her first solo exhibition in New York in twelve years.

The paintings in Everything Stays Different exhibit Loy’s metamorphic power. She addresses fundamental aspects of existence in layered narratives that synthesize her influences - social realism, psychoanalysis, childhood memories, and fairy tales - into a singular oeuvre that warrants reappraisal. Her beguiling casein on canvas compositions, populated with all-female protagonists, ask us to consider what we are and where we are going. She writes, “In the pictures there is hope, new paths, reflection on the past and visions.”

In Birth of a Mermaid, Loy’s all female protagonists huddle around a tender scene of a blue- haired mermaid cradling her newborn baby. Two women, perhaps midwives, tend to the mother; while a parade of interested human-animal hybrids and doll-sized female characters seem to fete the event. The fantastical quality of the scene endows the often over-medicalized event with dignity, beauty, and wonder. Rather than reinforcing the patriarchal concept of “Eve’s Curse,” Loy exalts birth and women nurturing women. Loy writes, “The world can no longer afford to continue to act without female knowledge, ability, intuition and experience. With my pictures today, I direct the focus on the feminine.”

Move further shows Loy’s project of addressing fundamental pillars of existence - birth, home, childhood, sexuality - with a vision that overturns power dynamics. In Move, this happens literally, as an alluring opal-eyed woman holds a tree-lined yard in her hands and glares at a house strapped askew a rolling base. The woman has the power and dominion to construct, move, and overturn the environment she holds in her hands. The lush painterly swathes of dusty rose pink in the background contrast with the clear lines of the foreground and give a sense that the protagonist is wresting order from chaos. Her life is her creation, and furthers the understanding that, in Loy’s universe, women hold power and weld it.

Eroticism courses through Loy’s work and seduces the viewer into her psychologically-charged dream worlds. She writes that, “For me, erotic means something hidden, a promise, a hope. In my opinion, every good picture is erotic.” In Chic, the scene is part carnival, part boutique. A woman in canary yellow sits on a canary yellow pillar. Crimson cones, harkening to the era of “bullet bras,” jut out of her. Loy describes the clothing as “weapon and beauty at the same time.” Another woman presents a huge, crimson, unmistakable phallic-pointed cylinder to the seated woman, who looks upon nonplussed, as she considers whether she’s interested or not. A home on a hill in the window behind her burns. Another woman sits on the floor in the foreground with a collection of long azure crystals between her spread legs and lifted knees, and, with eyes shut, outstretches a languorous open-hand to the ruby-red rimmed door in front of her. The women demonstrate authority and choice. They rule and run a male-less world.
Rosa Loy (b. 1958) is a German artist living and working in Leipzig, Germany. Her work has recently been exhibited at Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; Fondazione Coppola, Venice; Museum of Fine Arts, Leipzig; Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles; White Cube, London; and Essl Museum, Vienna. She is in the permanent collections of Museum of Modern Art, New York; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida; Busan Museum of Art, Busan, South Korea; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Pinakothek der Monderne, Munich and many others.

Media

Schedule

from October 16, 2020 to November 15, 2020

Artist(s)

Rosa Loy

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