Dani Michael Rosenberg / Hi, I Was Here and Thought of You

In his short story “Funes the Memorious,” Jorge Luis Borges describes a young man who, following a riding accident, acquires the gift of perfect memory: he remembers every detail of his life, even the shapes of the clouds on a particular day, yet he is rendered incapable of thinking, generalizing, or abstracting. Dani Michael Rosenberg (b. 1973, Holon, Israel) reflects on the nature of visual narratives and their relation to the real. He strings them along an invisible thread while simultaneously severing it, so that the images—like pearls slipping from a broken necklace—fall down the stairs. What is their inner logic, he asks; what memory do they hold, and what lies concealed beneath their surface.
In his first solo museum exhibition, Rosenberg presents three painting-drawing series—The Red Thread, Hide-and-Seek, and Hi, I Was Here and Thought of You—created both concurrently and sequentially, in ink and watercolor on paper. Through their insistent accumulation, the images constitute the intervals between childhood and adulthood, between withdrawal and passion, naïveté and violence. Evoking a sense of intimacy and familiarity, they are at the same time unsettling and disconcerting. The conceptual and emotional foundation underlying Rosenberg’s entire visual undertaking—the practice of painting-drawing itself—lies in culling, cutting, and assembling. The act of cutting and reassembling, like a decree of fate, ultimately converges in a kind of cabinet of curiosities, conjuring up what had been cast off and lost. Words and images are pushed into the drawers of passing time, like an inheritance repeatedly retrieved, each time in a different form.
The series Hide-and-Seek brings together works anchored in objects, places, and events whose connection appears entirely arbitrary: a porcelain angel figurine; a view of the ruins of Mussolini’s villa in Rhodes; a recollection of a childhood friend’s hand painted in red acrylic; leftovers of a seventeenth-birthday party; a moment from a game of hide-and-seek in which a child hides under a shroud-like blanket; a model of Mainz Cathedral appearing in David Lynch’s film The Elephant Man; a photograph of Rosenberg’s grandmother as a young girl, alongside a family of friends on a beach in a foreign country. This cluster of images unfurls a fan of possible histories, joining and unraveling with each new gaze, questioning the construction of fate in retrospect.
The image of the red thread—Der Rote Faden—has long served in German literature as a critical term addressing the need for narrative coherence and continuity, both personal and collective, in a world marked by fragmentation, disorder, and irrationality. The earliest and most intimate of the three series, The Red Thread is a family album of gazes, situations, and emotions, of seclusion and closeness, capturing the sense of time, pain, and love as they are lived in reality.
The series Hi, I Was Here and Thought of You, from which the exhibition takes its title, centers on trompe-l’oeil—an art technique aimed at producing the illusion of reality. Rosenberg responds to this tradition by constructing images within images, linking them to words set against wooden surfaces. Within these self-aware spaces, he juxtaposes textual excerpts from well-known literary works—including passages by Thomas Wolfe on passing time and marginal yet deeply consequential moments; Natalia Ginzburg on war, destruction, and loss; and Bruno Schulz on time’s elusiveness and fantastical manifestations of the violent aspects of existence—as well as everyday notes addressed to the artist, children’s drawings, art historical quotations (Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, John Currin), and renderings of domestic objects. The viewer’s gaze wanders between times and sights, reconstructing their trajectories.

Traces of people, objects, memories, and events surface in the exhibition as images that accumulate, intertwine, and haunt one another. Together, they weave a course of passion and nostalgia for the act of representation, while simultaneously indicating its impossibility, its failure. In their multiplicity, they embody painting-drawing as a labor of life, an act of survival.