Overview
Rachel Rose's first solo exhibition in Belgium examines the landscape paintings of the 16th-century Southern Netherlandish artist Joachim Patinir, one of the key figures in the genre's development. With a complete spatial experience, Rose aims to reveal the mystical dimension and surreal energies of a landscape experienced before industrialisation.
Rachel Rose’s first show in Belgium takes her ongoing fascination for the pre-industrialised landscape as its starting point. The presentation sees the artist examine a series of paintings by the 16th-century Southern Netherlandish artist, Joachim Patinir, to reveal the mystical dimension and surreal energies of a landscape experienced before industrialisation. Working at a time when medieval cartographic methods of representing the world came to be superseded by an aerial perspective, Patinir is known as a key figure in the development of landscape painting.
Rose’s new series of paintings, made using specific painting techniques to replicate, then warp, and then layer in new pigments, reconsiders three of Patinir’s works on the religious subject of The Rest on The Flight into Egypt. In both artists' depictions of the Biblical moment when Joseph, Mary and Jesus – fleeing persecution from the Romans – stop to rest, miraculous things happen amid the pastoral settings. Rose proposes through her reworkings of Patinir’s scenes that, imagistically, a hierarchy between emotion, religion, and land was being set here that continues today.
In addition to the exhibition at Cc Strombeek, the artist will also present a sculptural intervention in the church of the nearby Abbey of Grimbergen, the oldest inhabited Norbertine abbey in Belgium.
