Anna Rosen: Autofiction

Night Gallery is pleased to announce Autofiction, a presentation of new oil paintings by Anna Rosen. This is the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, following Skechers Shape-Ups Work (2013) and Egg and Dart (2021).

In Anna Rosen’s six new canvases for Autofiction, automobiles appear to commute across alternate planes of existence, while library shelves and fluttering pages hover in the background or on high. The cars suggest stand-ins for the self, while the books propose a manner of metabolizing information and experience. An alternately bold and gritty palette unites the works with a downtown sensibility. Their layered, atmospheric marks evoke superimposed time frames. The paintings become containers for color, pattern, and memory as they explore all that a two-dimensional medium can hold.

Rosen joins a long lineage of LA artists to bring vehicular considerations into the studio, but she rejects the sheen and impersonality that typically characterize such work. Instead, she abstracts autobiographical elements as she revises and reworks her surfaces. The charred black ground in Flowers Fish Fireworks (all works 2025) conjures the fire-ravaged landscape in Altadena, where the artist made her home before the Eaton fire forced her to evacuate. The blue crustacean in Car-driving Self is a nod to the artist’s days poring over volumes of paintings and prints from Edo period Japan in the downtown Los Angeles library. The depth of personal reflection collides with decoration. In the most precarious times, the aesthetic world offers a protective shell.

The artist paints on unstretched linen, which she adheres to stretched canvas. She often rips the fragments away, leaving marks that resemble sponging or monoprinting. Sometimes, Rosen keeps the fragments on her surfaces, allowing their borders to create new textures and frayed seams. Patches of raw canvas and disrupted marks privilege experimentation and open-ended dialogue over resolution.

Pasadena, Lightning, for example, features a contorted lightning bolt striking a car composed of mostly raw linen. A hazy black and blue figure, larger than life, hovers above. The title is a nod to a line in Lolita, in which the narrator describes his mother’s death in the succinct parenthetical: (picnic, lightning). The economical prose transforms tragedy into comedy as Rosen’s cartoonish clouds bring lightness to dark material. This tone turns memorial in Flower Fish Fireworks, in which flower stems double as the edges of a book, overlaid with a fleshy fish. The book’s yellow outline appears to transcend the black earth that surrounds it. Notions of an afterlife–for the environment, for scrapped paintings, for humans and their homes–abound.

Memory is imagistic. Where literary autofiction imposes language onto recollection, painting stays truer to the experience. Rosen portrays her first few years in Los Angeles as an amalgamation of car rides that keep offering new vistas and details, traumas and pleasures. Like the painter who returns to canvas year after year, any observant driver knows that the view is always changing, even if you take the same route.