Summer is here and the Cover Story for July and August features Rosa Tharrats’ “AVOC IVIDRAM” (2024), a work that veiled the exterior of Bombon Projects during the opening of her exhibition “Refugia” earlier this year. This show is the focus of Max Andrews’s first contribution to Artforum magazine, appearing in the summer issue.

“A ‘thongdrel’ is a monumental appliquéd cloth that Tibetan Buddhist monks unfurl for just a few hours each year for collective contemplation and spiritual cleansing”, Max writes. “Although it transpired in an unmistakably less serene setting than a monastery—Bombon Projects faces a busy road—the opening night of Rosa Tharrats’s exhibition intentionally appealed to comparisons with such sacred displays. A huge chartreuse-and-blue drape shrouded the gallery facade, adorned with bustles of fabric and cut with peekaboo perforations. A slit in ‘AVOC IVIDRAM’ gave access to the show inside, and at the end of the evening the cloth was unhitched and dropped to the ground, whereupon the remaining crowd folded it away. Not so much a curtain-raiser as a disarming curtain-lowerer, the ritual was evidence of Tharrats’s attentiveness to Buddhist traditions as well as of her showmanship and her understanding of textiles—she also works as a costume designer for film and theater.”

Rosa was one of seventeen artists and artist duos featured in the exhibition “Panorama 21: Notes for an Eye Fire”, curated by Hiuwai Chu and Latitudes, which opened at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) in October 2021. She presented a new textile sculpture in the passageway overlooking the atrium, with layers of woven and printed cloth protruding from the museum's columns like ragged sails on a ship’s masts.

This autumn, Rosa will be presenting a project with Gabriel Ventura as part of Manifesta 15’s program in Barcelona and surrounding cities. The biennial is scheduled to open on September 8.