Raquel Rabinovich: The Reading Room

In collaboration with the Vassar Libraries and to complement the concurrent exhibition "Past Time: Geology in European and American Art," the Loeb presented this solo exhibition of works by the artist Raquel Rabinovich who, throughout her career, has investigated how to make the invisible visible. The exhibition featured mixed-media works on paper that spanned from 1978 to 2017, including several works from her ongoing series "River Library" in which the artist uses mud from rivers around the world as a drawing medium. The layers of mud function metaphorically as texts that carry latent histories of the rivers and the civilizations that have lived along their banks for centuries.

The selections on view each represented an attempt to transcend the routine of every day, inviting viewers to enter into a place of contemplation in which many layers of meaning can be read in, or into, the individual artworks. Also on view were works from three other series, which all use language or numerical systems as a foundation. By layering symbols and materials on top of one another, Rabinovich often deliberately obscures hidden meanings and messages that unfold slowly before the viewer with time. Much like the books found on the shelves that surrounded the exhibition, the more one examines them closely, the more they reveal.

This exhibition was a collaboration with the Vassar College Libraries and was funded by the Virginia Herrick Deknatel Fund. There are works that appeared in this exhibition that were loans to the Loeb and therefore do not appear on this website.