ROSA LOY "Glade"

Michael Kohn Gallery is pleased to present Glade, an exhibition of new works by German artist Rosa Loy. For her third solo exhibition with the gallery, Loy presents a group of casein paintings and watercolors on paper. Glade will be on view from March 9 through April 20, 2024. 
 
One of the few female members of the New Leipzig School, Loy took up painting the same year as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. With origins as a trained horticulturist, she brings a surrealist’s eye to renderings of lush flora and uncanny all-female worlds. 
 
Throughout a monumental thirty-year practice, the artist has created a striking oeuvre in which this show expands. In Glade, Loy’s easel is a crossroads where German folklore is mixed with the artist’s subconscious. These visually intricate stories—their rich symbolism recalling Pieter Bruegel the Elder and the tradition of Surrealist female painters of the 20th century, such as Dorothea Tanning, Remedios Varo, Leonor Fini, Toyen, and Leonora Carrington—are wide open to viewer interpretation. Loy further situates her cryptic narratives within lichtung; a word she describes as “the place in the middle of a dark forest where the sun is shining.” Above all, this clearing is a site of rest amid a turbulent present. 
 
Loy likens the application of her main material, casein (an ancient water-based paint derived from milk protein), to the process of alchemy and its traditional associations with female labor. Brittle and thick, the casein imparts an intense creativity; the quick drying time means Loy must work precisely and intuitively as she builds up her compositions over several layers.
 
Whether cavorting through lush, natural landscapes or engaging in peculiar tasks, the relationships of Loy’s subjects are never fully defined. A female figure resembling a nymph (or possibly a devil) lounges on a tree branch in the intimate watercolor Aus Dem Augenwinkel, her gaze seemingly playful yet charged with eroticism. In her painting Überall, the striped legs of one woman fuses with a hole in the other’s pelvis, recalling a high-flying acrobatic act turned sideways. Their plaited hair mirrors the flat depth and rugged texture of the chanterelle-like background, posing questions of kinship with nature. 
 
“This show is about my clearing, the sunspot, the gas station within myself,” Loy explains. “We all know the feeling of moving forward as if in the undergrowth during our work. What a relief it is to finally reach a clearing after strenuous forward movement through the jungle. We all need a lot of light in these strange times.”