LIBBY ROSEN: Rib Erosion

Night Gallery is pleased to present Rib Erosion, an exhibition of textiles by Libby Rosen—a collaborative project between artists Anne Libby and Anna Rosen. This is Libby Rosen’s first joint solo show with the gallery, following Libby’s 2021 exhibition See Me So and Rosen’s 2020-1 exhibition Egg and Dart. 

Anne Libby and Anna Rosen come together under the moniker Libby Rosen, a collaboration that integrates the hypnotic marbling techniques of Rosen's works on paper with the eye-catching quilting for which Libby is known. This synthesis yields unexpected results as the preconceived representations of urban structures in Libby's work become distorted through the psychedelic lens of Rosen's marbling, which relies on chance. 

As the show’s cheeky, assonant title suggests, the works throughout Rib Erosion—its title a loose reordering of the letters in the artists’ names—delight in permutation and rhyme. In these process-based textiles, Anna Rosen’s jewel-toned, marbled silks rattle against and seep into the comparatively muted, earthy palettes of Anne Libby’s quilted satins, slyly disrupting their gridded frames. The creep of pigmentation is visible in Shower Scene (2022), in which giddy, oil-slicked iridescence gradually overtakes angular, gridded blue and black waves. The resulting compositions appear on the verge of both cohesion and fissure.

Libby Rosen draws on the artists’ shared interest in traditional craft techniques. Rosen’s marbled textiles use a process derived from Turkish Ebru painting, in which pools of acrylics are suspended on the surface of a water bath and coaxed with an awl into striated bands; a sheet of silk is then carefully overlaid on the bed to transfer its swirling eddies of pigment. The resulting compositions and patterns appear as devil-may-care psychedelic and as transient as a liquid light show projection, although they are actually the result of deft manipulations that ensure the strands never synthesize into a homogenous mud. These swatches snap periodically into the winking coherence of faces, flowers, a moon, and other imagery. Libby strategically incorporates swatches of Rosen’s fabrics into her quilted, patchworked grids, part of the sculptor’s ongoing series that captures the disorienting urban visual experience of encountering kaleidoscopic refractions of light on the glassine windows of skyscrapers.

In lieu of a conceptual conceit, Libby Rosen adopts a playful collaborative logic that follows the cadence of theme and variation. Rosen’s textiles, appearing like the bacterial growths of a petri dish, contribute a micro response to Libby’s macro compositions. The resulting works, taken from the patterns that cover the surface of our world, point to the generative possibilities for exchange.