Lost In the Dress Up Bin

T293 is delighted to announce Dylan Rose Rheingold’s first solo exhibition with the gallery in Rome. Rheingold presents us with “Lost In the Dress Up Bin” a collection of drawn, painted and printed works on canvas as well as wooden panels. Confrontational and honest, this body of work represents a journey into girlhood, interpreting personal and collective narratives around the psyche of adolescence, abjection, fantasy and otherness.

Rheingold is interested in the holes of art history, developing a formal language that engages with exaggeration, repetition and a kind of tenderness which treats “error” as an important, spontaneous manifestation of truth. Returning to a gaze which is proud and empathetic towards those parts of life which feel mundane, banal or incomplete has allowed Rheingold to develop a visual grammar which doesn’t concern itself with strict beauty standards but instead relatability.

Building universal characters is a challenge in and of itself growing up in an American culture which champions sculpted, statuesque-like perfection, especially in white suburbia. The idea of the teenager itself becomes a starting point into the question of what constitutes a whole person, as the adolescent is ultimately neither child nor adult and represents this transitional space. Since perfection is literally the state of completeness, Rheingold is interested in the borderline unfinished, formally and narratively.

The figures and materials Rheingold works with mimic her own mixed background, being the daughter of a Japanese-American mother and Jewish-American father. Storytelling is at the core of the artist’s practice, and the dynamism of emotions and non-linearity reflected in her formal language. It is a practice which involves patience, having time to communicate, reflect and reinvent.