Mika Rotternberg at her studio, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
In the last few years, Mika Rottenberg has created functional installations for eating and drinking —variations on bars—the first of which she aptly named Rottenbar. Rottenberg has created a newly commissioned bar designed especially for the greenhouse-like top floor of the Olivia Foundation. The forms of these installations are playful and organic, mimicking the natural growth of trees or resembling a large-scale bouquet of wooden branches covered in brightly colored, sometimes light-up, mushrooms. Planted among these forms are tabletops. Both these surfaces and the mushrooms are made from plastic that the artist has reclaimed into a primary sculptural and building material. This material, and the process by which she reimagines, reshapes, and reconfigures it, are at the heart of this project.
Rottenberg has long made artworks about labor—strange scenes that often involve women in surreal factory settings working in unlikely ways to produce even more unlikely “products.” This new project, in which she works with plastic detritus gathered from the city, using it to produce her inorganic sculptural forms, calls these scenarios to mind. Acknowledging plastic’s perfect adaptability to any and all consumer objects, and thus its ubiquity, Rottenberg has referred to it as a kind of “natural resource.” It is being constantly manufactured and seemingly disposed of just as quickly. Because it does not decompose, it is, paradoxically, an endlessly renewable resource. With her imaginative bars, Rottenberg is modeling the possibility of making functional things out of a material that will be, for better—or most likely for worse—with us forever— something we might all learn from as our world only becomes more precarious.
About the Artist
Mika Rottenberg was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and is based in upstate New York. She attended the School of Visual Arts for her BA and Columbia University for her MFA, both in New York. She has had recent solo presentations of her work at Musée Tinguely, Basel; Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto Canada; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and the New Museum, New York, among others. She has participated in biennials including the Busan Biennale, South Korea; Taipei Biennial, Taiwan; 16th Istanbul Biennial; Ural Industrial.