Curated by Kelly Taxter
While Game of Thrones viewers longed for the petite, fair-haired Daenerys to become a sweet and merciful queen, they instead got their eyelashes singed by this “mother of dragons.” Rachel Feinstein, whose life and fairy-tale work are often mistaken for a Cinderella story, can probably relate—the lightest surface scratch of her darkly surreal tableaux looses ominous multitudes. This November, the Jewish Museum will host the first US survey of Feinstein’s twenty-five-year career, uniting her winter-white grotesques in all their berserk and flamboyant glory with roughly fifty of her installations, drawings, videos, and maquettes, as well as a mammoth swath of panoramic wallpaper and a thirty-three-foot-long wall relief. Feinstein’s sensibility can encompass everything from a Rococo salon to a spectral snowscape: Walt Disney meets Francis Bacon, Fragonard meets the White Walkers. In a world of glib oppositions, it’s significant that there’s no “versus” in Feinstein’s nightmare wonderland. Here, Beauty and the Beast isn’t about genders or genres locked in a duel. It’s about how these non-binary struggles inhabit everyone.
