Michal Rovner

Pragim

On View
Apr 26 – May 28, 2025
London

Pace is pleased to present Pragim—Poppies in Hebrew—an exhibition of works by Michal Rovner at its Hanover Square gallery in London. Expanding on Rovner’s 2024 presentation Pragim at Pace’s 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York, the exhibition in London continues the dialogue around her long-term exploration of nature, memory, and transformation.

On view from April 26 through May 28, the show features a selection of prints, video works, and an installation. Since 2019, Rovner has filmed and drawn the wild poppies that grow in her field in Israel, forming an ongoing series that has shifted with time and events.

For over three decades, Michal Rovner has explored themes of identity, displacement, and collective memory, creating works that blur the boundaries between past and present. Her latest exhibition continues this inquiry, centering on the poppy—an enduring symbol of fragility and resilience, remembrance and loss. Across cultures, the flower carries different associations, yet in Rovner’s hands, rendered in stark tones of black, gray, and red, it takes on a haunting, almost spectral presence. Her human-scale poppies, swaying rhythmically, possess ephemeral delicacy and unyielding force, beauty, and distress. More than flowers in a field, they are echoes of the current state of unrest. Like all Rovner’s works, they address the human condition as reflected in the artist’s eyes.

Working across drawing, printmaking, video, sculpture, and installation, Rovner constructs layered compositions that abstract time and place, distilling broader human experiences into shifting, ambiguous forms. Among her most recognized projects is Makom (Place), a series of monumental cubic stone structures built from the remnants of dismantled Israeli and Palestinian homes in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Haifa, the Galilee, and the Israel-Syria border. Constructed in collaboration with Israeli and Palestinian masons, Makom reflects both the weight of history and the possibility of rebuilding—an act of creation forged from fragments of the past.

More intimate in scale than its New York counterpart, Rovner’s exhibition in London offers a concentrated look at the artist’s ongoing exploration of the poppy, drawing viewers into its layered meanings and evolving presence in her work.

2006-Photograph by_Daniel Tchetchik[1].jpg

About the Artist

Michal Rovner works with drawing, printmaking, video, sculpture, and installation to reflect on the continuum of human experience. Her work shifts constantly between the poetic and the political, using imagery that invokes the fragility of existence, identity, dislocation, and time. Generally avoiding direct representation of specific issues or events, Rovner reinterprets the present and historical memory. She records and erases visual information, obscuring specifics of time and place through gestural, abstract qualities.

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