Rachel Harrison, Venus, 2021 (detail) Courtesy the artist, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo Evan Bedford
This fall, Astrup Fearnley Museet will host a major solo exhibition by the American artist Rachel Harrison. Spanning mediums that include sculpture, drawing, photography, and painting, with an emphasis on recent practice, Sitting in a Room focuses on the experience of the body in social space.
Rachel Harrison (b. 1966, lives and work in New York) develops a nimble, layered method of artmaking that escapes easy categorization. In her work, cultural tokens, the history of art, and space itself come in for new scrutiny, levelling hierarchies through a democratizing process of sifting and accumulation.
Each of the exhibition’s five galleries have been conceived by the artist as distinct rooms—Sculpture Court, Town Square, Gym, Living Room, and Cabinet—and works are configured to place the viewer in contexts both intimate and public. Setting in its various guises is explored throughout the exhibition, which Harrison describes as neither a survey nor a retrospective, but rather an intuitive remapping of her latest work’s conceptual coordinates.
