GENEVA.- Espace Muraille, a singular exhibition space dedicated to contemporary art, was founded by Caroline and Eric Freymond. The couple are both collectors and patrons who wish to share their passion for contemporary art and for artists with the widest possible audience. The venue, situated at the heart of Geneva’s Old Town, is loaded with history, and the space was entirely reimagined and remodeled by Caroline Freymond, its artistic director, in order to host ambitious exhibitions—notably solo shows dedicated to international artists. After large-scale exhibitions spotlighting the French artist Monique Frydman (2015), Argentinian artist Tomàs Saraceno (2015), Iranian artist Shirazeh Houshiary (2016), American artist Sheila Hicks (2016), and British artist Edmund de Waal (2017), Espace Muraille gave carte blanche to Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson in 2018, for an exhibition-event hybrid encompassing several new works created in-situ.
Espace Muraille has invited the Israeli artist Michal Rovner for her first solo exhibition in Switzerland, perpetuating the venue’s stature as one of the top spaces of artistic creation in Switzerland. Curated by Laurence Dreyfus in close collaboration with the artist, her studio and PACE Gallery, which represents her work, the exhibition presents a dozen of Michal Rovner’s works of art - video installations and projections - , conceived specifically to dialogue with the space, including a new video especially made for this exhibition. An exhibition catalog has been published on this occasion.
Simultaneously, PACE Gallery is presenting a solo show of her works in its new space in Geneva, located on quai des Bergues.
It is an ambitious spotlight upon the work of a singular artist, humanist and sensitive, whose works speak to universal themes.
Michal Rovner (b. 1957, Israel) is known for her multimedia practice of drawing, printmaking, video, sculpture, and installation. Her work has and continues to define a new and evocative language of abstraction, broadly addressing themes of history, humanity and time. While generally avoiding specific issues or events, Rovner’s work shifts between the poetic and the political, and between current time and historical memory, raising questions of identity, dislocation, and the fragility of human existence.
Rovner has been the subject of over seventy solo exhibitions held at venues including The Art Institute of Chicago (1993); Israel Museum, Jerusalem (1994); Tate Gallery, London (1997); Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri (2001); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2002); and Museo d’arte contemporanea Roma (Al Mattatoio), Rome (2003). In 2003, Rovner was selected to represent Israel at the Venice Biennale where she presented the exhibition Against Order? Against Disorder?. In 2005, Fields was presented at Jeu de Paume in collaboration with Festival d’Automne à Paris, before traveling to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2006. Other major monographic exhibitions have been held at L’Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris (2011); Musée du Louvre, Paris, (2011); Instituto Cultural Cabañas, Guadalajara, Mexico (2014); and the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow (2015). Rovner was the recipient of the Tel Aviv Museum Award in 1997 and received an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2008, Ben-Gurion University in 2015 and Tel-Aviv University in 2016. In 2010 she received the prestigious honour “Knight of the French Order of Arts and Letters”.
Rovner was recently awarded the 2018 EMET prize in the culture and art category.
Michal Rovner has been represented by Pace since 2003.
