Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai presents ‘Roxy’, the first solo exhibition in China of internationally exhibited Dutch artist Gabriel Lester. Roxy draws its title and inspiration from American theatrical impresario and entrepreneur Samuel Lionel Rothafel, known as “Roxy” (1882-1936), and his legendary Roxy Theatre. Roxy has become synonymous with theatre, cinema, and numerous international namesake venues, which enabled its infiltration into a broader culture sphere. In his Roxy, Gabriel Lester was inspired by the innovative spirits and eclecticism embodied in Roxy stories that he found while researching 1920s silent films. Lester’s defining works, produced between the late 1990s and present, focus on reinventing the fundamental grammar and rhetoric that constitute the cinema and narrative forms.

For the ‘Roxy’, Lester created a site-specific installation based on the sculpture ‘Melancholia in Arkadia’, which the artist premiered for Salt in Istanbul in 2011. Melancholia in Arkadia was conceived by the artist as a three-dimensional experiment with the cinematic technique—in its case, the freeze-frame—and continued into his further exploration, for instance in his recent architectural sculpture in dOCUMENTA (13), which visualizes the cinematic cross-edit. The presentation in Shanghai showcases an array of lace curtains caught in a mind-bending moment of being blown up by a breeze from the locked windows in the museum’s passageway.