Tracey Rose | the artist
The artist Tracey Rose
Born 1974, Durban, South Africa.
Lives and works in Johannesburg, .
Style and technique of the artist: Video, Installation art, Performance Art,
Born 1974, Durban, South Africa.
Lives and works in Johannesburg, .
Style and technique of the artist: Video, Installation art, Performance Art,
Tracey Rose artworks on eBay
Original artworks, prints, exhibition posters, monographs, books, collectibles.
Original artworks, prints, exhibition posters, monographs, books, collectibles.
Biography and art, auction, artworks, interview, statement, website:
Ciao Bella
A young artist who is making an impact on the international scene, Tracey Rose is not a practitioner who jumps at every curatorial opportunity offered her, and has been known to withdraw from more than one exhibition if the circumstances have not seemed right. A cool consideration marks her approach. “I find it quite insulting when people don’t understand the gravity of what they’re working with,” says Rose, adding that her preferred period for working a concept through to its resolution is two years. With a Catholic upbringing and a rich ancestry which includes German and Khoisan forbears, Rose’s themes are the dissection of her own social history as a coloured person in South Africa, and issues of the body, identity and gender. Early works, like The Thinker,1996, dealt with specific incidents: a small reproduction of the Rodin piece is used as a weapon in a family argument…
Venice Biennale
You know what happened to me yesterday? I’m driving back from boxing, okay. I’m wearing my shades they look like Ray Ban knockoffs they kind of are
but they’re not really
they kind of are, okay [giggles] and my Billabong skullcap. And I’m driving back and I turn the corner down Joubert Street and these guys are walking across the road, and there’s a car up ahead so I slow down, and my window’s half down and this guy looks at me through the window and says “mlungu” [“whitey”]. I was so pissed off! So at times you can straddle racial/cultural/whatever kinds of boundaries you’ll play out a certain kind of role or character, but how it’s perceived by other people
it’s fucking weird man!..
Ten years ago, Tracey Rose, then a little known 27-year-old South African performance and lens-based artist, showed her new video installation, Ciao Bella (2001), a shambolic, operatic, feminist parody of Leonardo Da Vincis Last Supper (14958), at the 49th Venice Biennale. Commissioned by curator Harald Szeemann, this 13-minute three-channel projection shows Rose exaggeratedly performing multiple roles some fictional, like Vladimir Nabokovs Lolita, others grounded in historical fact, like Marie Antoinette and Ilona Cicciolina Staller…