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Michal Rovner, Nilus, 2018, 2 LCD screens and video, 57-1/16" × 65-3/8" × 4-5/8" (144.9 cm × 166.1 cm × 11.7 cm), Edition of 5 + 2 APs © 2019 Michal Rovner / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Michal Rovner

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b. 1957, Tel Aviv, Israel

Michal Rovner’s work shifts between the poetic and the political to explore questions of nature, identity, dislocation, and the fragility of human existence.

Rovner’s early work is characterized by the distortion of color and blurring of imagery. In the early ‘90s, Rovner explored images of encampment and surveillance, abstracting their specificity through a process of reprinting; this investigation can best be seen in her photography series Outside (1990–91)—featured in her first major museum show, Outside: Michal Rovner, Works 1987–1990, held at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel, in 1990—and Decoy (1991). In 1994, Rovner’s One-Person Game Against Nature (1994) was featured in New Photography 10 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. By the late ’90s, her blurred figures coalesced into migrating crowds in dream-like worlds, using cyclical repetition as a device.

In the following decade, Rovner’s video work (incorporated into her practice in 1992) began taking cues from expanded cinema, leading her to collaborate 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), depicting thousands of ambiguous silhouetted figures marching to the music of Israeli composer Rea Mochiah. This work was presented again the following year at the Venice Biennale where Rovner was selected to represent Israel with the multi-faceted exhibition Against Order? Against Disorder? (2003).

Rovner is interested in 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). Introducing site-specific and archeologically driven work into her practice, in 2006 Rovner began working with Israeli and Palestinian masons on a series of monumental structures titled Makom (Place), comprised of stones from dismantled or destroyed houses in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Haifa, the Galilee region, and the border of Israel and Syria. In 2013, Rovner created Traces of Life, a permanent installation at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland dedicated to the memory of 1.5 million Jewish children murdered in the Shoah.

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.

Rovner has been the subject of over sixty solo exhibitions held at venues including The Art Institute of Chicago (1993); The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (1994); Tate, London (1997); Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri (2001); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2002); MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (2003); Musée du Louvre, Paris, (2011); Instituto Cultural Cabañas, Guadalajara, Mexico (2014); Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow(2015); Espace Muraille, Geneva (2019); Kunsthaus Göttingen, Germany (2021); Fondazione Merz, Turin, Italy (2022); and Peter Marino Art Foundation, Southampton New York (2023), among others. Her work is held in numerous collections worldwide, including The Art Institute of Chicago; The British Museum, London; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The Jewish Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, among many others.

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Michal Rovner, Waving (Maybe), 2018, LCD screen and video, 74-13/16" × 42-1/16" × 5-3/8" (190 cm × 106.9 cm × 13.7 cm), Edition of 5 + 2 APs © 2019 Michal Rovner / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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Michal Rovner, Blue Crossing, 2018, LCD screen and video, 57-1/8" × 32-5/8" × 3-3/8" (145.1 cm × 82.9 cm × 8.6 cm), Edition of 5 + 2 APs © 2019 Michal Rovner / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York