Guided tour of the exhibition "Aura Rosenberg: Statues Also Fall in Love"

Aura Rosenberg explores the inner lives and desires of monuments from different epochs. The space between them is the space between us. Our private longings embed in an overarching universal history, in which ancient mythologies confront contemporaneity. Rosenberg questions this common domain: what does public space mean today? To whom does it belong? What is this scenario for its ostensible protagonists, namely statues and public sculptures?

Rosenberg's recent work centers on a series of lenticular prints that juxtapose contemporary images and classical iconography from Greek and Roman mythology. For Statues Also Fall in Love she produced black & white lenticular prints that flip back and forth seamlessly between photographs she shot of classical and neoclassical sculptures and sensual images in identical poses of present-day actors that she found online. With this approach the artist references the Apollonian and Dionysian opposition in ancient Greek culture. It brings our attention to the inconsistencies in interpretations of “pure white” archaeological artifacts, including canons of beauty, gender, nobility and eroticism. All depends on context. The museum sublimates otherwise sensual images, rendering them purely esthetic. Accordingly, this series features iconic statues, including Hercules and Aphrodite, Prometheus, Head of Hercules and Lucretia. The artist playfully reminds us, that monochrome marble statues, which we know from museums or sightseeing tours, originated as colorfully painted sculptures.

Aura Rosenberg has also made work about sculpture in her native New York City, namely the popular Charging Bull and Fearless Girl statues in the Financial District. Polemics aside, the psychological tension between the two works served as a starting point for another series of drawings and lenticular prints. Here, Charging Bull and Fearless Girl parallel the myth of the Minotaur and the labyrinth, recalling not only the famous classical iconography, but also the cult of Pablo Picasso. These themes recur in Rosenberg’s most recent film The Space Between Us (2024), made in collaboration with writer and filmmaker Veronica Gonzalez Peña. The exhibition does not omit another mythically “intersubjective” figure: the Unicorn, which appears from antiquity all over the world and in all civilizations, including the most discussed public sculpture and site of the Przesiadkowo in Łódź.

Curated by Barbara Piwowarska