Michal Rovner

Michal Rovner's work navigates between the poetic and the political, delving into themes of nature, identity, displacement, and the delicate nature of human existence.

She reimagines historical memory and modern themes through her multimedia approach, working in drawing, printmaking, video, sculpture, and installation. Her artworks blur the boundaries between recording and erasing visual information, obscuring specifics of time and place. As a result, her pieces emerge as gestural, intricate, and abstract reflections on the enduring spectrum of human experience.

Biography of Michal Rovner

Michal Rovner was born in 1957 in Israel. From 1979 to 1981, she studied Cinema/Television and Philosophy at Tel Aviv University. Later, she received a BFA from the Bezalel Academy of Art (1981-1985).

Her early work was focused on the distortion of color and the blurring of imagery, as seen in her series "Outside" (1990–91), which was featured in her first major museum show at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 1990. Another early significant work is "Decoy" (1991). At the time, Rovner centered her focus on images depicting encampment and surveillance, abstracting their specifics through a process of reprints.

In 1994, her piece "One-Person Game Against Nature" was featured in "New Photography 10" at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. By the late 1990s, Rovner's work evolved to depict migrating crowds in dream-like worlds, utilizing cyclical repetition and duration.

Over the subsequent decade, Rovner's video work, which became integral to her practice in 1992, drew inspiration from expanded cinema. Her mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2002 showcased her multichannel video work "Time Left," which featured thousands of silhouetted figures marching to the music of Rea Mochiah. This work was also presented at the Venice Biennale in 2003, where she represented Israel.

The artist also developed a fascination with geological objects, particularly those marked by human intervention, which she saw as transmitting history across time into both present and future contexts. This interest led her to integrate video with sculpture through projection, exemplified in her exhibition "In Stone" (2004).

In 2013, Rovner designed "Traces of Life," a permanent installation at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum dedicated to the 1.5 million Jewish children who perished in the Holocaust.

Michal Rovner's works have been featured in numerous exhibitions worldwide. Recent solo shows include "Michal Rovner: Pragim" at Pace Gallery in New York (2024), "Michal Rovner" at Peter Marino Art Foundation in South Hampton (2023), "Michal Rovner. Alert" at Fondazione Merz in Turin (2022), and "Model Animal / Model Tier" at Kunsthaus Göttingen in Germany(2021).