Distortion as Revelation: The New Work of Roee Rosen

Caspar David Friedrich Swastika

Israeli artist Roee Rosen, under the curatorship of Mia Frenkel, presents his new exhibition “Silly Sea Sly Sky” from May 7 to June 20 in Tel Aviv. Bringing together three bodies of work created over the past year, the exhibition offers an immersion into a universe where humor, the grotesque, and collective memory intertwine in a constant tension between apparent lightness and political depth.

From the moment of entry, in the project space titled “Rosie”, visitors are confronted with a series of black acrylic paintings on paper. These works originate in a mural recently presented in Germany, within a context shaped by a critical reflection on the Nazi past of a patron linked to the institution. In this series, Rosen reactivates the visual language developed in his project The Life and Death of Eva Braun, summoning a disturbing iconography in which the innocence of children’s fairy tales is fractured under the weight of History.

Inspired by Little Red Riding Hood, these scenes coexist with depictions of moons in which swastikas are concealed, embedded within landscapes evoking the German Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich.

At the heart of the exhibition, the oil paintings introduce a more physical dimension to the viewing experience. The Silly Sea series is based on a deliberately “erroneous” principle of suspension. Each canvas can be presented in two ways: either the horizon remains straight and stable while the frames appear absurdly tilted; or the frames are aligned “correctly” at the expense of a destabilized horizon, transforming the sea into a fluid substance that seems to spill out of the painting.

Through the clouds and their reflections, figures emerge. This act of identification—recognizing shapes in the sky—oscillates between childhood imagination and conspiratorial thinking, a recurring motif in Rosen’s work.

The young cleaning lady

The exhibition continues with a series of portraits that the artist himself describes as “idiotic.” The painting Zionist Golem condenses several foundational figures of Israeli imagination: David Ben-Gurion’s hair, Moshe Dayan’s eye patch, and Golda Meir’s facial features.

All of this is placed upon an amphora, a nod to Dayan’s fascination with archaeology. On the figure’s forehead appears the word “truth,” a direct reference to the Prague Golem myth, as well as to the historical bulletin of the Israeli Labor Party. Rosen here plays with symbols, fuses them, détournes them, until they produce an image that is both familiar and deeply unsettling.

Wolf's dance

The works refuse to submit to the rules the artist himself establishes. They deviate, mock, contradict. This spirit of formal insubordination becomes a language in its own right, revealing tensions between order and chaos, between collective narrative and subjectivity.

An Israeli-American artist, filmmaker, and writer, Roee Rosen is known for a complex and provocative body of work that often interrogates the boundaries between history and the present, documentary and fiction, politics and eroticism. He is a professor at the faculty of arts at HaMidrasha, Beit Berl College in Israel.

Over the years, Rosen devoted significant work to his fictional female character, the surrealist painter and pornographic filmmaker Justine Frank. This project led him to create her entire oeuvre from scratch, along with a book, Sweet Sweat (Sternberg Press, 2009), and a short film, Two Women and a Man (2005).

The exhibition opens on May 7 at 7 p.m. at the Rosenfeld Gallery in Tel Aviv.

Caroline Haïat