Anna Ostoya: Lee

Curated by Alaina Claire Feldman

October 28—November 28, 2023

Opening Saturday, October 28, 12:00-3:00pm

Reading performance at 1:30pm

Rubin & Chapelle (R&C Projects)
964 Madison Ave, New York, NY
nyc@rubinchapelle.com

To open one’s eyes to the world is to bear witness. Lee Miller was initially a fashion model who first graced the cover of Vogue in 1927 and represented the new “modern look” for women during a relatively liberal period of economic prosperity in the United States. In the following years, she became both a muse and collaborator to the American and European Surrealist avant-garde, as well as an underrecognized collaborator and producer of their work, all while developing her own oeuvre. After a difficult break up, Man Ray used an image of her eye in his piece Object of Destruction (1932), a metronome readymade that opened itself to violence should the ticking sound become too overbearing.

The turbulence of WWII opened Miller’s eyes to the political turmoil of the greater world around her, inspiring her to pick up a camera and bear witness as a war photographer for numerous publications and the United States army. Miller’s eye, now channeled through the work of Anna Ostoya, is appropriated not as nostalgic reflection on the past, but as a catalyst for a feminist recuperation of the future. Here, her gaze is employed to parse the past within the long durée of sexism, modernity, and “genius” in the West.

At Rubin & Chapelle’s New York flagship store, Lee once again inhabits the world of fashion. However, now she gazes out towards the Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue, a stark modernist and brutalist contrast to the sparkling boutiques of the Upper East Side, and a nod to her experimental legacy. This exhibition features four works by Ostoya in heterogenous media which radiate out from the gaze of Miller’s blinking eye: an animation, a photomontage, a print, and a mixed-media painting. Ostoya’s painting Lee (2023) derives from her photomontage featured on the cover of her 2021 book with political theorist Chantal Mouffe, Politics & Passions, in which the two discuss agonism (a political and social theory that emphasizes the potentially positive aspects of certain forms of conflict) and the political possibilities of art under neoliberalism. Lee is an abstract portrait from a series of subway sketches of New Yorkers interwoven among reproductions of the artist’s past works. Clues to identify the individual in the foreground are purposefully withheld, opening different possible perspectives and positionalities. This allows one to view the portrait as anti-essentialist or deterministic given the multiplicity of possible subjectivities. The central portrait stands in stark contrast to the figures in the background of the painting, photographic reproductions of stuffy suits, kingmakers of the avant-garde and Miller’s peers including Man Ray, Jean Arp, and Max Ernst. This background is seen again in the photomontage The Tradition of Intensity and Force (2011), whereas Miller’s eye is seen again in the animation Lee in Motion (2022) and small print Indestructible Lee (2023).

Ostoya often returns to her past works and challenges the linear structure of history through appropriation in order to develop a kind of anti-modern newness. She repositions the avant-garde past as something rooted in social materiality, such as the eye of Lee Miller as both an object of violence and a subject bearing witness, thereby moving away from pastiche and complicating a singular or master genealogy. While we are all informed by history and our past, this should not foreclose the progressive possibilities of our future.

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Born in Krakow in 1978, Anna Ostoya has lived in New York since 2008. Her work spans multiple aesthetic traditions and includes painting, collage, photomontage; at times text and objects. She is mostly known for her geometrically fractured paintings, textured collages and photomontages of look-alike found images.

Ostoya attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York, the Städelschule in Frankfurt/M and the Parsons School of Art and Design in Paris. Her book collaborations include Polish Rider (MACK 2018) with Ben Lerner and Politics and Passions (MACK, 2021) with Chantal Mouffe. Her work has been shown, among others, at Kunsthaus Baselland (2019), Zacheta National Gallery, Warsaw (2017, solo), Tate St. Ives (2015), Lyon Biennial (2015), La Kunsthalle Mulhouse (2013, solo), Museum of Modern Art in New York(2013), CCS Kronika, Bytom (2010, solo), The Power Plant Toronto (2011), Lisson Gallery in London (2009) and Manifesta 7 Rovereto (2008). It is part of collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Defares Collection, Dutch National Bank Collection, RISD Museum Collection, Gaby and Wilhelm Schürmann Foundation, De la Cruz Collection, Zacheta National Gallery and European Central Bank.

Partners Sonja Rubin and Kip Chapelle co-founded Rubin & Chapelle in 1997 and were among the first designers to establish retail presence in New York’s then burgeoning Meatpacking arts district in 2002. The designers have both been inducted into the Council of Fashion Designers of America and have received several awards and nominations from institutions including Fashion Group International, The Smithsonian, A Senatorial Citation, and the City of Vienna, Austria. Their collections have been exhibited in the MAK Museum in Vienna, Museum of Arts and Design in NYC, and The Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT). Their garments can be found in the collections of the Chicago Arts Institute and the Museum FIT.

Rubin & Chapelle’s collaborations with living artists, R&C Projects, have been central to their creative ethos. In addition to staging exhibitions in their showroom and boutiques, R&C Projects invites artists to develop patterns and textile prints ad hoc. Artists who have been collaborators include Gregory Coates, Helga Davis, Berta Fischer, Mia Enell, Angelo Flaccavento, Axel Koschier, Edmundo de Marchena, Joseph Montgomery, Marcel Odenbach, Kottie Paloma, Hermes Payrhuber, Steven Rose, Aura Rosenberg, Semjon H.N. Semjon, Wolfgang Stiller, Kara Walker, Atalay Yavuz and more.