Rochelle Feinstein: The Today Show

For over four decades, New York born and based artist Rochelle Feinstein (b. 1947, Bronx, NY) has mined the conventions of abstraction in the context of rapidly shifting cultural, political, and media landscapes by integrating a wide range of media—including printmaking, photography, sculpture, collage, digital techniques, and everyday materials such as cardboard, tape, trolleys, and shopping bags.

Feinstein is not a gestural painter in the traditional sense. Rather, she is fascinated by the painted gesture as a bearer of meaning within the vocabulary of abstraction. Her compositions emerge through complex, additive, and technologically mediated processes: UV printing, collages or digitized sketches that simulate painterly spontaneity. For Feinstein, painting becomes a critical tool to interweave image, language, and social conditions.

With The Today Show, the Ludwig Forum Aachen—in cooperation with the Secession in Vienna and Kunsthaus Glarus—is presenting Rochelle Feinstein’s first institutional solo exhibition in the Rhineland. Featuring around 30 large-scale new works, created primarily between 2021 and 2025, the exhibition offers profound insights into Feinstein’s rigorous engagement with abstraction.

The exhibition opens with the large-scale diptych Tagged (2019), which features historical photographs of boxing matches held in Rome and Milan during the mid 1930s to the mid 1940s under Italian fascism. Feinstein reproduced the photographs as silkscreen prints, arranged them in filmstrip-like grids across the canvas, and painted additional grids in rainbow hues. The images document popular sporting events, yet they subtly allude to everyday social structures within a state of exception. The boxing match becomes a metaphor for ongoing conflict—an allegory for Feinstein’s own artistic practice—which both draws on and disrupts the traditions of abstract painting.

In the centre of the exhibition is a group of paintings created in 2024 using layered and combined techniques. While working on them, Feinstein serendipitously encountered the collage series Eleven Ways to Use the Words to See (1976/77) by New York painter Lee Krasner (1908–1984). Krasner’s series exemplifies her method of “recycling”: repurposing and reworking her own earlier artworks, titled after verb tenses and grammatical modes. In Present Perfect, Present Continuous, Simple Present, and Present Conditional (LK), for instance, Feinstein has echoed this approach by combining painted canvases with collaged screen printed fragments on muslin, which are, in turn, based on ink brushstrokes made on composition paper. Both in dialogue with Krasner and grounded in a deep engagement with the present—reflected in the exhibition’s title The Today Show—these paintings translate various present tenses into visual abstractions.

The site-specific installation Curtains (2025), produced especially for the Ludwig Forum, further explores this logic. Here, brushstrokes in Feinstein’s characteristic rainbow spectrum, a recurring element since 2017, are repeated as patterns printed on fabric. Hung in the form of a curtain, the work guides visitors through the exhibition while simultaneously marking its end.

With The Today Show, Feinstein is bringing her full range of painterly gestures and artistic strategies, developed across different series and projects, together for the first time. Techniques previously deployed in specific contexts—such as the rainbow palette, painterly gestures mediated through collage and screen print, the grid, or the use of photographic imagery—are now interwoven in a comprehensive and cohesive manner.

The exhibition captures Feinstein’s multilayered techniques and material combinations as snapshots of the present moment. Her work, she suggests, is “…as much about painting as it is about the social and political upheaval we’re living through." Feinstein activates abstraction as a relational field: her works consistently emerge in an ever evolving present of politics, pop culture, and art history. "My work is not a placebo for trauma, self-care, or healing, nor does it offer illusionistic space—I leave that to others. My hope is to open up a space for reflection on the current state of culture, conveyed through the language of painting." The title The Today Show not only alludes, with irony, to the popular US morning infotainment show, but also critiques the increasing collapse of news and entertainment—a phenomenon Feinstein addresses via artistic means.

The Today Show marks the conclusion of a multipart exhibition cycle at the Ludwig Forum Aachen dedicated to abstract painting. It began in 2023 with Ulrike Müller’s Monument to My Paper Body (whose wall paintings remain on view) and continues with Amy Sillman’s Oh, Clock! (on view through August 31, 2025).

Curated by Eva Birkenstock, curatorial assistance: Miriam Schmidt