This publication accompanies Rebecca Warren’s first solo exhibition in Vienna at Belvedere 21 (15 July – 16 October 2022) and features works made especially for the show.

Rebecca Warren engages in an expressive game with female anatomy — ambiguously humorous and grotesque, figurative and abstract, monumental and filigreed.

She became known to a wider audience in the late 1990s, with her large-scale unfired clay sculptures which were tortuously modelled, scraped, gouged female forms, often with parts—a hand, a breast, a calf, a ponytail—nightmarishly or comically exaggerated.

‘The Now Voyager’ at Belvedere 21 consists of nine new, large hand-painted bronze sculptures on variously coloured plinths and a number of new neon collages shown on walls designed by the artist.

Many of these sculptures (which in their variety Warren likens to the cast of aliens in the bar scene in Star Wars) are broadly figurative, and some are additionally top-heavy, leaning, working against gravity, straining against their own bulk and weight.

The collages, made of neon, household paint, wool, and other elements, are presences of a different order: they suggest a strange system of communications manifested as glyphs, oddly familiar peripheral glimpses, and distant, nocturnal vistas.

Accompanies the exhibition ‘Rebecca Warren: The Now Voyager‘. 15 Jul – 16 Oct 2022, Belvedere 21, Vienna.

English and German text.