1914: MAGNUS PLESSEN

Rose Projects 1B | 1914: Magnus Plessen presents recent work by Berlin-based painter Magnus Plessen (b.1967) alongside the historical materials and documents of World War I that inspired this body of work. For years, Plessen has returned repeatedly to look at Ernst Friedrich’s War Against War (1924), the seminal anti-war polemic that used censored photographs to reveal the grim realities of the war, including graphic images of the facial wounds suffered by soldiers in the trenches. Plessen's figurative paintings convey the shatter and shock of the men's identity through passages of black—not abstraction per se, but a kind of blind representation. 1914 is the second in a series of three exhibitions organized by curator-at-large Katy Siegel. The series, Rose Projects 1, focuses on artists who refuse the categorical divides between representation and materialist abstraction.