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Rachel Harrison at Astrup Fearnley Museet

September 30, 2022–February 12, 2023
 
The largest show by American artist Rachel Harrison in Scandinavia will debut on September 30 at the Astrup Fearnley Museum. Sitting in a Room emphasizes current practice while incorporating a variety of media, including sculpture, drawing, photography, and painting.
 
Harrison’s deft, multi-layered artistic process defies simple classification. As formalist concerns are pushed to compete with renegade elements from the outer world, abstraction is laced with vernacular reference to startling, frequently comedic effect. In order to level hierarchies through a democratizing process of filtering and accumulation, cultural artifacts, the history of art, and space itself are subjected to new scrutiny. By using the very means of transportation used to ship and store the commercial objects that populate her work, Harrison frequently uses packing crates or random cardboard boxes as the material for her creations, blurring the line between sculpture and base.
 
Harrison’s room-scaled approach to this exhibition, which gets its name from a 1969 piece of sound art by Alvin Lucier, I Am Sitting in a Room, also demonstrates this awareness of the context in which art exists. The artist designed the five designated galleries as separate rooms, naming them Sculpture Court, Town Square, Gym, Living Room, and Cabinet. The works are arranged to put the visitor in both private and public settings. The exhibition, which Harrison defines as neither a survey nor a retrospective but rather an intuitive remapping of the conceptual coordinates of her most recent work, explores setting in its numerous guises.
 

Curated by Solveig Øvstebø.

The Astrup Fearnley Museet will release a comprehensive catalog with texts by Negar Azimi, Anne Dressen, Lars Bang Larsen, and Solveig Øvstebø in conjunction with the exhibition. This richly illustrated book, which is slated for distribution at the conclusion of the show, will include images of Harrison’s work in other mediums as well as installation views of Sitting in a Room. It was created by Joseph Logan.

Rachel Harrison. 1966) graduated from Wesleyan University in 1989 and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. This solo exhibition at the Astrup Fearnley Museet follows a mid-career survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2019-20). Harrison’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions and catalogs and is represented in major public collections worldwide.

Astrup Fearnley Museet
Visiting address: Strandpromenaden 2
0252 Oslo
Norway
Hours: Tuesday–Friday 12–5pm,
Thursday 12–7pm,
Saturday–Sunday 11am–5pm

T +47 22 93 60 60
[email protected]

www.afmuseet.no
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