Libby Rothfeld “Junker”

Bureau

This event has ended.

“The underside [of the baptismal bowl], however, was inscribed in a variety of ever-changing scripts with the names of those heads of the household who had been its owners over the course of time. His father’s name was there, as was in fact his grandfather’s, and his great-grandfather’s; and now that syllable came doubled, tripled, and quadrupled from the storyteller’s mouth; and the boy would lay his head to one side, his eyes fixed and full of thought, yet somehow dreamily thoughtless, his lips parted in drowsy devotion, and he would listen to the great-great-great-great—that somber sound of the crypt and buried time, which nevertheless both expressed a reverently preserved connection of his own life in the present to things now sunk deep beneath the earth and simultaneously had a curious effect on him; the same effect visible in the look on his face. […] At the sound of those somber syllables, religious feelings got mixed up what a sense of death and history, and all of it together somehow left the boy with a pleasant sensation—indeed, it may well have been that it was solely for the sake of that sound, just to hear it and join in reciting it, that he had once again asked to be allowed to see the baptismal bowl. […] A familiar feeling stole over him—a strange, half-dreamy, half-scary sense of standing there and yet being tugged away at the same time, a kind of fluctuating permanence, that meant both a return to something and a dizzying, everlasting sameness, a feeling that he knew well from previous occasions and that he had been waiting for, hoping it would touch him again. It was partly for the sake of that feeling that he had contrived to have this abiding, mutable heirloom shown to him.”
-Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

Junker is Libby Rothfeld’s second solo exhibition at Bureau. Rothfeld (b. 1990, New Brunswick, New Jersey) lives and works in Queens NY and received a BFA from New York University. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include: Everybody Knows, SpazioA, Pistoia, Italy, 2020; Confidence in Motion, Downstairs Projects, New York, 2018; Noon and Afternoon, Bureau, 2017; 1999, Antoine Renard & Libby Rothfeld, curated by Siliqoon, Marsèlleria, Milan, 2017; A Dumb Sound, A Sweet Bell, Anne Libby & Libby Rothfeld, 315 Gallery, Brooklyn, 2017; AAa:Quien, Erica Baum & Libby Rothfeld, Bureau, 2017; Libby Rothfeld, First Continent, Baltimore, 2015; and Good To Think With, Good To Think Against, Kimberly-Klark, New York, 2015.