Simone Rosenbauer's latest series, Like Ice in the Sunshine evokes joy and elusiveness simultaneously. In each work, a Popsicle is centered on a different DayGlo colored background. The pictures are sugary pop confections that seduce with their radiant artificial color. Each shows an idyllic summer treat with all the heightened power of commercial product photography, but this ideal is literally melting before our eyes. With this one simple motif, Rosenbauer deftly evokes both the joy, and the ephmerality, of youthful summer months.
Simone Rosenbauer's series Small Museum investigates a large variety of small museums and their caretakers throughout rural Australia, culminating in a body of collective imagery and conversations. This series attests to the human imperative to collect, archive, sustain and display objects for public consumption. Throughout Australia small museums proliferate, often founded and operated by a single individual to serve the local community by preserving and commemorating an event or trauma, particularly where the human diaspora and issues of colonization are experienced. The archive of Small Museum consists of portraits of the museum founders, exteriors of the museums themselves, interiors, and specific details which Rosenbauer calls her Cabinet of Curiosities.
German/Australian artist Simone Rosenbauer lives and works on the lands of Awabakal and Worimi in Awabakal country, in Newcastle, Australia. She studied Photography at the University of Applied Sciences in Dortmund, Germany), where she received her BA and MA in 2006. In 2008 she received the European Endeavour Award from the Australian Government to study for her MFA in Photography at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, which she completed in 2010.
Rosenbauer’s photography has won and been selected for numerous national and international awards. Her work has been showcased in the USA, Europe, Australia, Russia, Asia and Africa, including exhibitions at the Aperture Gallery (NYC), Expo Chicago, Paris Photo, Laurence Miller Gallery (NYC), AIPAD (NYC), Musée d’Elysée (Switzerland), Les Rencontre d’Arles (France), Flash Forward Festival (Canada), Art Miami (USA) and PhotoSpring Festival Beijing (China). Rosenbauer’s work is held in various public and private collections. She is represented by Laurence Miller Gallery in New York, M Contemporary in Sydney, Sanderson Contemporary in Auckland and DTR Modern in Boston.