Rachel Rose - The Rest

Gladstone is pleased to announce The Rest, an exhibition of new paintings by Rachel Rose. Presented at our 64th Street gallery, this body of work expands upon the artist's past investigations into the relationship between storytelling, landscape, and the structuring of our belief systems. Rose here addresses the canon of devotional paintings that depict the biblical allegory of the holy family's flight to Egypt. Illustrating a pause in the journey of Mary, Joseph, and the newborn Jesus as they escape the threat of King Herod, these images typically conflate the natural world with indications of serenity, danger, or the miraculous, situating the story's protagonists in a world driven by symbolism. For The Rest, Rose has chosen to address this moment exclusively from the perspective of Mary, depopulating the picture plane and extracting all imagery extraneous to this singular point of view. Through this lens, we see the edge of a forest, the drift of clouds passing through the sky or over a moon, the prismatic refraction of the sun's light, branches bending towards the earth. The 13 paintings included in the series expand this moment to a full day, charting the shift from dawn to morning, afternoon to dusk, and dusk to night.