FARO staircase mural Tokyo

Photos by Shu Nakagawa
Thank you to Takuro Someya Contemporary Art

 

Homage at Josef Albers Museum

Homage 43 & 49 at Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop

Photos by Philipp Ottendörfer, 2023

Thank you to
Family Collection Klinkhamer,
Collection Tim Whidden,
Infinite Objects.

 

Solo exhibition at Museum Folkwang

Color, Code, Communication
Curated by Thomas Seelig

Opening: April 20 at 19:00
Live performance by Legowelt 23:00 at Goethe Bunker

The exhibition consists of various manifestations of immaterial art (projections, screens, murals, instructions, books, happenings, music). My work will also be exhibited at the Josef Albers Museum in Bottrop.

April 21-22: NFT symposium at Museum Folkwang

RAFAËL ROZENDAAL
Color, Code, Communication
Rafaël Rozendaal is one of the world’s best-known digital artists. Already in the early 2000s, he created, presented, and sold works in the form of websites. In his current NFT projects, he also creates references to art history, using generative technologies on the blockchain. Rozendaal’s works exist in multiple forms and locations: as immersive installations, in browser windows, as artist books, and in public spaces. Color, Code, Communication is the first major monographic NFT exhibition in a European museum and is accompanied by a symposium.

 

Screen Time at TSCA Tokyo

Rafaël Rozendaal – Screen Time
26 November – 24 December, 2022
Takuro Someya Contemporary Art

Photos by Shu Nakagawa

Screen Time comprises two ongoing series of works: Into Time, a series of lenticular paintings, and Abstract Browsing, a series of jacquard tapestries.

As hinted by the title of this exhibition, both Into Time and Abstract Browsing are explorations into the nature of time in its various forms.

Rozendaal has remarked in interviews and writings that the “landscapes” we most often encounter in our contemporary society are seen through the “window” of a screen on our electronic devices rather than an actual window in space. In the context of the history of humans and landscapes, we have shifted from the time when people looked out into the world through physical windows to the time when families gathered around the television set to watch moving images. And now, in this present moment, we have grown accustomed to spending our time on the individual screens of our personal devices, consuming our favorite content when and where we please. If one were to name these different periods on the basis of their visual cultures, perhaps “screen time” would be a fitting one for this most recent iteration. As the title of this exhibition, Screen Time evokes the expanse of time in which the continuum of visual culture is developing.

For artists attempting to face the questions posed by our contemporary aesthetics, Rozendaal has long been a pioneering figure. Abstract Browsing is a series of jacquard tapestries based on images of abstracted websites, which are created by “abstract browsing.net,” a browser plug-in developed by the artist in 2014. The tool, available for free on Google Chrome, abstracts all information present on a webpage into geometric units of bright colors. Rozendaal runs this program daily on well-known websites ranging from newspapers to real estate listings, generating thousands of images. From those, he selects compositions that appear striking or unusual in some way to create as paintings through the medium of jacquard weaving. The jacquard loom is an early prototype of the computer; as such, the textile it produces can be understood as both a digital image and a mechanically produced material. With this choice of medium, Rozendaal draws out the connection between digital images and traditional manufacturing techniques to highlight that, far from being a new media, the “digital” has a long history.

The new tapestries presented in this exhibition are all the same width but vary in height, with some of the tallest approaching three meters. Their exaggerated dimensions recall the vertical format of scrolling through the web on our phones. In this way, these works emphasize the shared verticality of web browsers and the weaving process, in which the fabric takes shape one row at a time. In recent years, however, it has also become possible to take screenshots of entire web pages. Unlike the experience of scrolling and taking in text and information slowly, the screenshot transforms the website into an image that can be seen in its entirety in a much shorter span of time. This is also in stark contrast to the slow unfolding of time that is inherent to the process of creating a tapestry. In these ways, the various textures of time that exist within the screen as a tapestry and among the many other screens that make up our daily lives are interwoven into the tapestries presented here.

Into Time is a series of lenticular paintings that departs from the traditional concept of painting in that they cannot be experienced instantaneously but must be seen over a duration of time. Some of the works in this series are based on the geometric patterns and color gradations generated through Rozendaal’s website works, intotime.us, intotime.com, and intotime.org.

Rozendaal’s lenticular paintings contain time within them, and as such, it is only by moving our bodies around these works that we can experience them in their entirety. The surface of a lenticular painting functions similarly to that of a screen such as an RGB monitor or an image cast by a projector. But whereas monitors and projectors are media that display images standing in for physical “landscapes” as they change to and fro, the nature of the lenticular medium is such that it becomes the shifting image itself. And just as an actual landscape contains an infinity of views that depend on the position of the viewer, so too does the lenticular. The new lenticular paintings presented in Screen Time reflect the ongoing development of Rozendaal’s sense of colors and their combinations.

Both the jacquard tapestry and the lenticular print are materials with long histories. By selecting them as his media, Rozendaal draws our attention to the largely unknown connection between such traditional techniques and the digital devices and technologies with which he makes images, enabling us to understand these seemingly disjointed elements as points along the continuum of our visual culture. This exhibition, and Rozendaal’s artistic practice as a whole, hints at the diversity of time in its many forms. The expanded scale of Rozendaal’s newest work draws us into a new moment following the many disruptions brought about by the pandemic as well as the rise of NFTs, allowing us again to enjoy the experience of standing before a physical work and letting the time pass us by.

 

Mechanical Paintings

Mechanical Paintings at Upstream Gallery
October 30 – December 18, 2021
photos by Gert-Jan van Rooij

 

Permanent Distraction Exhibition

Permanent Distraction
Site Gallery Sheffield
September 23 – December 23, 2021
Photos by Jules Lister

 

Silence, a public art project in Canada

Silence is a public artwork I created for PXL Gallery, Canada’s largest lowres art installation. Only 28 x 88 giant pixels. Photos by Gus Sarino.

 

Shadow Objects Sculpture Park

Shadow Objects Sculpture Park
A 3D exhibition for Tokyo Art Book Fair

 

Mechanical Painting (laptop)

laptop rafael rozendaal

Mechanical Painting 20 03 02 (Laptop)
Enamel on Steel
170 x 120 cm
On view at Deitch Gallery New York until November

 

Quiet, Calm, Staring – online exhibition at upstream.gallery

Upstream Gallery proudly presents its online platform upstream.gallery dedicated to host a new series of online exhibitions. These exhibitions will be developed, curated and participated by artists that belong to the top of the digital art world. The first exhibition is curated by Rafaël Rozendaal: Quiet, Calm, Staring

Participating artists: Claude Closky, Constant Dullaart, JODI, Olia Lialina, Jan Robert Leegte, Peter Luining, Jonas Lund, Guthrie Lonergan, Jonathan Puckey / Moniker, Evan Roth, Claudia Maté, Michael Manning, Rafaël Rozendaal.

“We have been online before the crisis and we’ll be here after.”

For this first exhibition Rafaël Rozendaal made a selection of 13 artists who use websites as a medium. He chose to select websites that require no interaction, websites that are endpoints. No information, no links, they are destinations.

As the artist mentions:
“…Art is a place for reflection and contemplation. Quiet, calm, staring. Trying to observe without too many thoughts. We are used to viewing art that way, but the internet is a different place. The internet is fast paced, jumping from link to link, from impression to impression.
Websites are ubique (ubiquitous) objects, they can exist in many places simultaneously. It might sound obvious, and we take it for granted, but I think now more than ever we understand why websites are a very special place for artists to make work. Websites are different from any other medium… they use computational processes to generate living moving images. Browsing them has it’s own rhythm, it’s own flow of time, different from video, TV or cinema…”

 

discrete objects at upstream gallery

Discrete Objects
Upstream Gallery 2019
Photos by Gert-Jan van Rooij

 

centraal museum utrecht

A selection of websites on the facade of Centraal Museum Utrecht
Curated by Bart Rutten
Photos by Gert-Jan van Rooij

 

Nervous at Postmasters Roma

 

Random Fear in Kunsthal Rotterdam

“Random Fear with Mirrors”
at the exhibition “Trouble in Paradise, collection Rattan Chadha”
Kunsthal, Rotterdam
Photos by Job Janssen & Jan Adriaans

 

“Don’t do too much” exhibition at Postmasters, New York

Don’t do too much
exhibition at Postmasters Gallery, New York
2019
Photos by Tamas Banovich & Kyle Knodell

 

Freedom of Movement at Stedelijk Museum

Freedom of Movement, curated by Karen Archey
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 2018
Photos by Peter Tijhuis

 

Haiku at Galeria Cavalo, Rio

 

Selected websites at Cleveland Institute of Art

photos by Field Studio

 

Abstract Browsing 17 08 10X

Abstract Browsing 17 08 10X
(Google Docs, Feedly, iMore, Top Ten Reviews, Waze,
Reviews, Amazon, Nerdwallet, Google Drive, Twitter)

Jacquard weaving, 280 x 510 cm

Photo by Josefina Eikenaar

On view at Textile Museum Tilburg as part of the Color & Abstraction exhibition.

 

Generosity at Towada Art Center Japan

Generosity
Solo exhibition at Towada Art Center
Curated by Kodama Kanazawa
Photos by ​Kuniya Oyamada​