Rona Stern
One Day Less (detail) 2021
digital print.
Third Space Gallery + Digital
ONE DAY LESS
Rona Stern
November - December 2021
In a canonisation of the mass-manufactured, single-use decoration, Rona Stern successfully and humorously undermines the formal tropes of foreverness that we attach to the monumental. Her assemblies describe an uneasy architecture of usurpation. Rarely does the legitimate beauty of the form trump hierarchies of material scarcity, status and taste. Yet Stern, from materials of the lowest value in every sense, presents works of undoubtable valuable, for their sculptural elegance as well as for their deft irony.
For Third Space Gallery + Digital, Stern exhibits a selection of sculptures and digital images that, in this awkward commercial passageway, thousands of kilometres from her studio, comment on the ubiquitous nature of forms, both public and privately consumable in a global economy. Everything has started to look the same, global economics advance continuously, the market is always open somewhere. The sun never sets on accumulation and we party ‘til sunrise in an abyss of replication.
- Sarah Jones, curator
Rona Stern
By the rivers of Babylon, 2015
Building blocks, LED lights and plexiglass print.
Dimensions variable
Rona Stern (b.1984) traces the imagery of the everyday, the decorative, the historic, and the commercially abundant, all of which become ubiquitous in their reproduction in public space. Applying the syntax of marketing and commercial language within a formal sculptural practice, she reconfigures these images, disassembling the realm of the spectacular consumed by the masses, and reinventing the monumental.
Stern recentlly graduated a Meisterschüler (post graduate studies) at HGB, Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, DE, supported by a 2-year DAAD German academic exchange service scholarship. She holds a B.Ed. FA from Hamidrasha School of Art, Beit Berl (2011) where she graduated with honors. Stern has been invited to participate in international artist-in-residence programs including, Tobacna 001 culture center in Ljubljana, SL (2018); Meet Factory, Prague, CZ (2017); Yarat contemporary art space, Baku, AZ (2017); and Artist Unlimited, Bielefeld, DE (2017).
Recent solo exhibitions include:
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Big Dreams Bigger Disappointments, A&O Kunsthalle, Leipzig, DE (2019)
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Those who cannot remember the past are destined to repeat it, Tobacna 001 culture center, SL (2018)
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From north to south we come from east and west, Artist Unlimited Gallery, Bielefeld, DE (2017)
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Keep Calm at Klubovna Gallery, Brno, CZ (2017)
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In the Middle of the East at Büro für kulturelle Übersetzungen Gallery, Leipzig, DE (2016)
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Oasis at Hezi Cohen Gallery, Tel Aviv, IL (2015)
Select group exhibitions include:
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Action-Line: The 7th Biennale for Drawing, Jerusalem Artists' House, IL (2019) and Künstlerhaus Sootbörn, Hamburg, DE (2018).
