Martha Rosler

Active since the 1960s, Martha Rosler is one of the most important figures of the American art scene. Her art is a form of critical analysis of contemporary society through photographs, videos, performances and written texts. Focusing on the public sphere, Rosler explores issues that range from everyday life and the media to architecture, especially as they affect women. She has for many years produced works on war and the national security climate — connecting life at home with the conduct of war abroad.
The photomontages in the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, New Series were born in 2008, during the wars waged by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, and resume one of Rosler’s most celebrated body of works, House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (1967-72), a series of twenty photomontages that originated as flyers to demonstrate against the war in Vietnam. In that series Rosler combines interior views of middle-class American homes with scabrous images of war. Similarly, the two exhibited works combine glossy fashion magazine images with photos of war scenarios. Resuming the strategy of visual sabotage in which one image insinuates itself into another, Rosler decomposes the coherence of the official narrative with respect to the events portrayed. With these works, the artist not only reflects on the images that war creates and how they are disseminated and received by the public through the media, but she also highlights the correlation between consumerism and imperialism, the erosion between public and private spheres, and the ever-present gender stereotypes.