Kay ROSEN’s investigation into the visual possibilities of language has been her primary focus since 1968 when she traded the academic study of languages for language-based art. Through paintings, drawings, murals, prints, collages, and videos, ROSEN has sought to generate new meaning from everyday words and phrases by substituting scale, color, materials, composition, graphic design, and typography for the printed page. ROSEN considers language to be found material, placing her in the more passive role of an observer of written and oral speech, whose potential she recognizes and enables through minimal intervention.
“Kiss of Death” functions as a verbal surrogate for the expression of complex emotions. It shows what happens when two words with similar structures - KISS and KILL - are combined to form a third word. In so doing the word shifts from a readable linguistic unit to a visual one. The first two letters, K-I, synch up, but the last two dissonantly form a disagreeable Frankensteinian image. The new word is at worst incomprehensible and at best ambivalent. Are we looking at hate or love or both? The newly blended word might come closer than either word separately to expressing something about human relationships.
Kay ROSEN’s work has been the subject of numerous articles, reviews, and group and solo exhibitions and projects worldwide for over forty years, including a twenty-five year survey of her work in 1998-1999 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Otis College of Art Design titled “Kay Rosen: Lifeli[k]e.” Her work is part of major institutional collections, including New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, and The Art Gallery of New South Wales. Recent solo exhibitions (2024) include “Kay Rosen: Now and Then” at the Weserburg Museum for Modern Art in Bremen, Germany and “Kay Rosen: Prints and Drawings” at Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York City. “Kay Rosen With Terry R. Myers In Conversation” can be found in The Brooklyn Rail’s December-January’s (2023-2024) issue. She is represented in Vitamin Txt: Words in Contemporary Art from Phaidon Press, 2024, and is a contributor to Hello We Were Talking About Hudson, about the late American art dealer behind the legendary gallery Feature Inc. Her solo show “Kay Rosen: ICI” will be on view at Michele Didier Galerie in Paris this summer from May 23 to July 13, 2024.
ROSEN taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for twenty-four years. She lives and works in New York City and Gary, Indiana.
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