Easy Pieces, New Museum, NY

This exhibition marks the first New York solo museum presentation of work by New York–based artist Mika Rottenberg (b. 1976, Buenos Aires, Argentina).

Employing absurdist satire to address the critical issues of our time, Rottenberg creates videos and installations that offer subversive allegories for contemporary life. Her works interweave documentary elements and fiction, and often feature protagonists who work in factory-like settings to manufacture goods ranging from cultured pearls (No Nose Knows, 2015) to the millions of brightly colored plastic wholesale items sold in Chinese superstores (Cosmic Generator, 2017). The exhibition will present several of her recent video installations and kinetic sculptures, and will premiere a new video installation, Spaghetti Blockchain (2019), that explores ancient and new ideas about materialism and considers how humans both comprise and manipulate matter. Together, the works in the exhibition trace central themes in Rottenberg’s oeuvre, including labor, technology, distance, energy, and the interconnectedness of the mechanical and the corporeal.

This exhibition is curated by Margot Norton, Curator.

Mika Rottenberg (b. 1976, Buenos Aires, Argentina) lives and works in Brooklyn. Recent solo exhibitions include MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (2019); Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London (2018); Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2018); Bass Museum of Art, Miami (2017); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2016); Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA (2014); Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2013); and Magasin 3, Stockholm (2013). Rottenberg was included in the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale (2018), Skulptur Projekte Münster (2017), the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), and the Taipei Biennial (2014). She was awarded the 2019 Kurt Schwitters Prize and the 2018 Smithsonian Art Prize.