Talks & Conversations

Artist Talk: Rozeal.

A woman sitting on a floor with her body angled to our left nearly fills this stylized, vertical painting. Her skin is light tan in some areas, as around her eyes, chest, one hand, and the leg and foot we can see, while what seems like brown paint creeps up her neck to drip upward around her cheeks and onto her forehead. The brown also drips down onto her cleavage, along one arm toward her wrist, and down the shin of her leg. Her right hand, on our left, is entirely brown. She holds her long hair up over her head with her brown hand in front of her face, looking at it with blue eyes and touching it with the other hand. Her hair is blond with dark roots at her scalp, created with long, parallel brushstrokes. Her long nails and curling lips are scarlet red. She wears an emerald-green robe trimmed with white fur and a long strand of pearls that drape over her left arm, closer to us. She sits on a cushion decorated with brown koi fish and stylized blue waves of water, but the exact arrangement of her legs is unclear. A stack of patterned pillows is piled behind her to our left, and comes up to her shoulder. Red circular forms behind her head are painted slate blue with deep brown shadows and red highlights. The words “BACK AND FORTH” are repeated in rows, written in capital yellow letters edged with red, filling the background. Two Japanese characters are painted in red near the lower right corner.
Rozeal. (formerly known as iona rozeal brown), afro.died, T., 2011, acrylic, pen, ink, marker, and graphite on birch plywood panel, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase with funds provided by the Women's Committee of the Corcoran Gallery of Art), 2015.19.243

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Celebrate Back and Forth: Rozeal., Titian, Cezanne with exhibition artist Rozeal. and Molly Donovan, the National Gallery’s acting head of modern and contemporary art and curator of contemporary art. Their conversation will explore Rozeal.’s creative practice and revelations from Back and Forth. 

About Back and Forth: Rozeal., Titian, Cezanne

Spanning six centuries and different cultures, four paintings reveal how artists engage with art history—and become part of it.

Art history isn’t linear. Artists mix and remix references, finding inspiration across time.

When contemporary artist Rozeal. began painting afro.died, T. in 2011 in her studio just outside Washington, DC, she didn’t have Titian’s Venus with a Mirror in mind. Paul Cezanne wasn’t thinking about Titian’s Ranuccio Farnese when he painted Boy in a Red Waistcoat in 19th-century France. Yet these works share striking visual similarities with Titian’s 16th-century paintings.

Back and Forth illuminates unexpected connections between these four works and invites us to see them in new ways.  

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A young boy with pink and tan-colored skin stands next to a seated woman with an ashen white face, and both look out at us in this vertical portrait painting. The scene is created with broad areas of mottled color in rust and coral red, pale pink, lilac purple, ivory white, and shades of tawny brown. The eyes of both people are heavily outlined with large, dark pupils. To our right, the woman’s pale, oval face is surrounded by a muted, mint-green cloth that covers her hair and wraps across her neck. Her eyes are outlined with charcoal gray, and her heavy lids shaded under arched brows with smoky, plum purple. She has a straight nose, and her burgundy-red lips are closed in a straight line. Her long, rose-pink dress is lavender purple below the knee, and is scrubbed with darker pink strokes across her lap. Her sleeves are tan on the upper arms and cream white on the forearm, over two blush-pink forms that represent her hands resting on her thighs. Along the top of her shoulders, her dress is terracotta red. A rectangular, fog-gray form behind her could be a chair or a half-wall, the top edge of which is higher to our right of her head. To our left, the boy has dark brown, short hair over putty pink, protruding ears. The area between his eyelid and arched brow is filled in with chocolate brown, giving his staring eyes a hooded look. His jawline, chin, and lips are outlined with dark brown. His khaki-brown, knee-length coat has pale, rose-pink sleeves and a black collar. An area of pale, ice blue could be a kerchief or high-collared shirt, and he wears fawn-brown pants. One of his slippers is coffee brown and the other, closer to the woman, is slate gray. He holds a loosely painted, pale, turquoise-blue object in one hand at his waist. The pair are situated against a background painted in areas of coral, ruby, crimson, and wine red. Two vertical, concrete-gray strips behind the boy and woman could be columns. The floor along the bottom edge of the painting is pale pink.

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