Rachel Feinstein Sculpts Her Own Legacy Among Italy’s Old Masters

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The artist's dark and fantastical works face off with Renaissance creations in an upcoming exhibition in Florence.

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By Laura Rysman

This article is part of our special report on the Art for Tomorrow conference that was held in Florence, Italy.

Creativity and patronage thrived in Florence during the Italian Renaissance, yet a working artist's life was almost impossible to achieve for a woman — a prohibitive convention that proved hard to shake over the following centuries. Our own era, however, is making much more space for the talents of women and other long-sidelined identities.

In Florence, opening June 9 through Sept. 18, a career survey dedicated to the painter and sculptor Rachel Feinstein pairs her work with that of Renaissance masters like Donatello, Tintoretto and Luca della Robbia, in a pointed conversation between the past and present, and between male and female visions.

As Ms. Feinstein's second career survey, after her Jewish Museum show in 2019, the Florence exhibition will extend across three different locations, at once on display in the Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Museo Stefano Bardini and Museo Marino Marini, where her work will meet with Marini's revered midcentury sculptural creations as well.

The New York-based artist, celebrated for her dark-tinged depictions of the female experience and fairy-tale iconography, will bring together dozens of her works for the occasion. Among them: her "Angels" series of Victoria's Secret models reimagined as idolized yet vulgarly carnivalesque superhero statues sculpted from foam and hand-covered in colored resin, and her saint paintings intricately rendered on mirrors instead of canvases, devoid of eyes so as to reflect back one's own.

Recovering from a skiing accident that left her with a broken leg, Ms. Feinstein spoke over video, seated on a studio couch as her pair of monkey terrier dogs alternated turns in her lap. She talked about some of the issues around art and gender that were the subjects of a panel at last week's Art for Tomorrow conference in Florence, organized by the Democracy & Culture Foundation and journalists from The New York Times. The conversation has been edited and condensed.

Your process of working is quite physical and hands-on, so how are you doing with your preparations for the Florence show?

Well, I’m sharing a studio with John [her husband, the painter John Currin] now. My sculptures have been moved in here, and it really changes the tone of the studio, I think, like this big woman here. [She pointed to "Fireworks," a color-splotched female figure over 6 feet tall, from her "Angels" series.] When we first met — we’ve been together since 1994 — we had studios in the same space, and for the first time since, we’re working side by side again. It's really different to come back to seeing every little step of what we each do every day. The hardest part of being an artist is going weeks at a time without anyone looking at what you’re doing, and then you have to self-regulate and make sure you’re actually accomplishing something.

For the show, I was really excited about trying to do one of these new clay reliefs that I’ve been working on. I wanted to create the biggest one I’ve ever made. In Florence last year, we visited Luca della Robbia's ceramics, and for the first time, I noticed that the really big ones are made like puzzles, with pieces they fire separately and fit together. So I was going to make this giant one out of all these different pieces, but I’d have to stand on both feet, push the clay on the wall and scrape it — all very physical. So that will have to be a later project.

How do you hope people will read your works in the context of Renaissance Florence?

I’m very excited to show in Florence because Donatello is my absolute king. He was the master of that feeling of your body that you can get with sculpture, you know? Painting for me is about being totally out of your body — you’re not in your body, you are in that painting, floating in that sphere like a soul, but when you’re looking at a sculpture, you’re feeling it around your body. With all these "Angels" sculptures, there are some that are very large, on the exact scale of the Donatello "Magdalene," and there are some that are a little smaller than life that are based exactly on the size of Donatello's "David." I have four David-size girls and four Magdalene-size girls because I was going for the body experience. The Magdalene is just slightly larger than life, so there's this feeling that she's a monster.

The show puts your work in dialogue with some of the greatest artists of the past — with Donatello, with Tiepolo, with Della Robbia. What does it mean to exhibit alongside them?

As a contemporary artist, I was lucky to have Kiki Smith, Ursula von Rydingsvard and Judy Pfaff as teachers [in the 1990s]. But there's nothing that could ever compare to being in Florence in the Renaissance — to their skill level and experience. But at the same time, I’m alive and [those Renaissance artists] are dead. I read Carl Jung's book, "Memories, Dreams, Reflections," and he talks about his belief that the ghosts of the canon are watching you, but they’re not able to do anything because they’re dead and therefore passive. I’m looking at them as my heroes, but I am alive and I am making this work as a person of this time — and I wouldn't even have been allowed to even do any of this stuff being a woman in their time.

And this isn't just work created by a woman, but work that shines a light on women's lives as well. Can you talk about how you represent that?

During Covid, I went a little crazy because I think I’m more of an extrovert than John, and also I was taking care of our three kids. I’ve spoken to a lot of women about it — they say it was like going back into the Middle Ages. The reason women artists haven't done so well is because they had so many other responsibilities in life, and only very wealthy women were able to do it, if they didn't have kids or if they had a lot of help. You realize you can't think about anything like making a sculpture if you’re worrying about food and all that.

Covid made me freak out about providing for my family in a way that was so primitive and strange. The same phenomenon didn't happen to John, which is so interesting. Somehow the freak-out of the world meant that women, or whoever was the caretaker in a relationship, had to lock things down.

Part of that experience became a lot of the pieces that are going to be in Florence. These saint paintings with no eyes, painted on mirrors, that was all from Covid. I took the eyes out and realized it was like I imagined myself as one of those martyrs.

Today, there's much more space for art by women and about women's beauty and bodies seen through the female gaze. Do you feel like that's changing how your work is received?

Absolutely. I’m very happy to be looked at in a different way now than before, when it seemed like interest in me was because I was young and pretty, and I had been a fashion model. That aspect was terrible.

In the ‘90s, a lot of the female artists that are successful today were shown in a totally weird, fashion kind of context. At the time, we were just excited to get any attention at all. In the ’70s, there were artists making work using their bloody tampons and that kind of stuff. Then the ‘80s canceled all that out. In the ‘90s, I was into the body awareness, third-wave feminist stuff with Kiki Smith, and I was particularly interested in the disgusting-ness of the body as a way to get to the femaleness.

There's a whole bunch of weird stuff about being a woman. But I’m very conscious of the biological fact that having a uterus and ovaries is actually really great in terms of being an artist. It's pretty intense to have such a complicated body compared to men.

Laura Rysman is a contributor to The Times and T Magazine, the Central Italy correspondent for Monocle, and the author of the Wallpaper Guide to Milan.

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