AVIARY: JANE ROSEN

JANE ROSEN has the unique ability to evoke both enigma and precision with her work. Her chosen subjects, animals wild tame, are used as vehicles to explore their instincts and natural intelligence. For Rosen, understanding animal nature is the key to understanding human nature. Much of her work concerns capturing a moment when an animal is caught in the act of looking or doing; these creatures have an intention, but how aware are they of themselves and their actions? Rosen’s work subtly and elegantly poses this question.

Aviary integrates brand new work from Jane Rosen's California studio with a continuation of the artist's immersive solo exhibition Posted / Turning from the summer of 2024. In the sunlit gallery, Aviary cogently displays the immense range of the artist's scope, following over forty years of the study, emulation, and immersion of herself in nature. If da Vinci's Codex on the Flight of Birds (1505 - 1506) brought us the concept of human flight, Rosen's Aviary brings us rather to the aerie of the self; the artist's lifelong pursuit of the sublime, something that speaks to the better nature found within us all. Three towering, watchful owls, one in carved French limestone and two in hand blown and pigmented glass, Burgundy rose marble and limestone, perch alongside a curated selection of work from this monumental exhibition. Two introspective wall birds (Paterson  and Dark Paterson) in rough limestone take their names from both a William Carlos Williams longform poem and the Jim Jarmusch film (2016). A pair of ravens, Posted / Turning, themselves symbolic of thought and memory in the Norse tradition and with the amethyst of peace blown into their beaks, complete the Aviary.

Jane Rosen has the unique ability to evoke both enigma and precision with her work. Her chosen subjects, animals wild and tame, are used as vehicles to explore their instincts and natural intelligence. For Rosen, understanding animal nature is the key to understanding human nature. Much of her work concerns capturing a moment when an animal is caught in the act of looking or doing; these creatures have an intention, but how aware are they of themselves and their actions? Rosen’s work subtly and elegantly poses this question. 

Rosen is fascinated with cultures like the Innuits, Native Americans, and Egyptians. For these groups, art was a by-product of an investigation of being and mortality rather than an aesthetic pursuit. She cites not only these cultures but Renaissance masters like Michaelangelo and da Vinci as influences. Like these artists, Rosen excels across several different mediums, including sculpture, painting, and drawing. Traces of all three can be found in each; upon close observation, a sculpture has been painted, or a drawing has had several layers of wax sculpted onto its surface.

Rosen was born in New York City, where she grew up and began her career as an artist. Despite finding early success in galleries and a prestigious teaching position in the city, Rosen found herself captivated by the accessibility of nature on a visit to the West Coast. She eventually relocated permanently to San Gregorio, California, on the coast south of San Francisco, where she keeps her studio and resides on a horse ranch frequently visited by the birds and mammals you see in her work.

Rosen was selected by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for inclusion in their 2010 Annual Invitational in New York, a prestigious exhibition juried by some of the greatest artists of our time. A masterful and sought after teacher, Rosen has taught at numerous elite institutions, including Bard College in New York, Lacoste School of the Arts in France, Stanford University, and the UC Berkeley. Rosen’s work has been reviewed in the New York Times, ArtForum, Art in America, and Art News.

Her work has been exhibited across the United States. It is in numerous public and private collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Aspen Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Chevron Corporation, the collection of Grace Borgenicht, JP Morgan Chase Bank, the Luso American Foundation, the Mallin Collection, the Mitsubishi Corporation, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. An upcoming solo retrospective will open next year at the Bakersfield Art Museum, as will an invitational group exhibition of sculptors to be held next summer at The Church, in Sag Harbor, NY. Jane Rosen’s monograph, Dual Nature, was published by Pointed Leaf Press in 2021.