Roee Rosen: A Group Exhibition

The wild and fascinating world of the artist Roee Rosen is featured in the first comprehensive exhibition of his works at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. This exhibition constitutes a mid-career retrospective for Rosen, whose paintings, video works, installations, multimedia works, artist's books and texts have been exhibited worldwide  for over three decades.

Rosen periodically creates new projects around a specific theme or fictional character whose world is presented to the viewers. Curators Joshua Simon and Gilad Melzer chose to present this solo exhibition as a group exhibition, which features the worlds and figures that Rosen creates or impersonates. This wide-ranging oeuvre is now on display in several different galleries at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

The blurring of boundaries between documentation and fiction, present and past, and the concern with historical traumas, bifurcated identities, seduction, and ironic humor are characteristic of Rosen's oeuvre as a whole, and are reflected in the different exhibition galleries.

A central part of the exhibition is devoted to the artists invented by Rosen in the course of his career: Justine Frank (1900–1943), a Jewish-Belgian writer and artist who was affiliated with the Surrealist movement in Paris and later lived in Tel Aviv in the 1930s; and Maxim Komar-Myshkin (1978–2011), the most recent character invented by Rosen – a young Russian émigré who established an artistic collective named "The Buried Alive" in Tel Aviv, creating a Russian cultural ghetto at the heart of the Israeli art scene.

The project "Live and Die as Eva Braun," which is considered a key work in the context of artistic representations of the Holocaust and of Nazism, presents a virtual scenario – an experiential journey with Eva Braun, Hitler's lover, during the last days of the war in a Berlin bunker.

The group exhibition space contains "other" works by Roee Rosen, including his Martyr Paintings, Frosted Self-Portraits, Funeral Paintings, and Israeli superhero Ziona. The exhibition also features the artist's book The Blind Merchant, which is being published 25 years after its creation.

Rosen's films will be on display in the Laurence Graff Gallery of Contemporary Art –  

In the film The Confessions of Roee Rosen (2008, 56 minutes), foreign female works present the artist's confessions without understanding what they are saying. This film was first screened at the FID Marseilles International Film Festival, where it received honorable mention, and has since been screened in numerous venues worldwide.

The film Out (2010, 35 minutes) centers on a sadomasochistic scene that is transformed into a political exorcism. This film was screened at the Venice International Film Festival, where it was awarded the Orizzonti Prize for best medium-length film, and has since garnered numerous international awards.    

The film Hilarious (2010, 21 minutes) explores the collapse of comic mechanisms. The virtuoso performance by Hani Furstenberg consists of a monologue that ends with an epic joke unfolding in the Twin Towers during their collapse. This film premiered at the Tate Modern in London.

The premiere of Rosen's latest film, The Dust Channel, will be celebrated in the course of the exhibition.