About the work

Rachel Rossin is a multidisciplinary artist who brings together painting, installation art, virtual reality and computer programming. Drawing on her fascination with digital technology, she explores the increasingly blurred boundary between the physical and virtual worlds. Her work creates hybrid environments in which reality, simulation and imagination merge.

Rossin grew up in Florida and began drawing, playing multiplayer video games, and programming and hacking software at a young age. She describes these activities as ways of creating worlds of her own in which she could escape the turbulent circumstances of her childhood. That personal experience continues to provide an important foundation for her artistic practice.

Her paintings and installations combine influences from digital visual culture with the tradition of painting. She often begins with images from video games, virtual environments and digital landscapes of her own creation. She translates these into expressive paintings in which distorted landscapes, still lifes and abstract brushstrokes merge. The result is a dreamlike visual world in which recognisable elements continually appear to dissolve into digital fragments.

A defining element of her recent oeuvre is the group of works known as hologram combine paintings. In these, Rossin integrates holographic LED fans directly into the surface of her paintings. They project moving holographic images in front of the canvas, allowing the painting literally to break out of its two-dimensional plane and become a spatial, constantly changing experience. This creates a new dialogue between traditional painting and digital technology.

In Leda, Rossin refers to the Greek myth of Leda and the Swan and to Michelangelo’s lost painting of the subject, created around 1530. Because the original work has disappeared and survives only through copies and variants, it perfectly aligns with Rossin’s fascination with reproduction, simulation and the blurring of the distinction between original and copy. The painted composition is based on digital renderings developed by the artist herself, while the built-in holographic fans project floating images of animals and mythological symbols in front of the canvas. Painting, sculpture and digital projection thus merge into a single dynamic whole.

Throughout her oeuvre, Rachel Rossin moves effortlessly between physical and virtual reality. Her work examines how digital technology changes our perception of time, space and identity. At the same time, she creates immersive environments that offer room for introspection, processing and recovery, while critically questioning the increasingly indistinct boundary between simulation and reality.

Rachel Rossin

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