Kay Rosen

Bio

Kay Rosen is an American painter whose work is largely text-based. Many of her works are representations of words in which certain letters have been juxtaposed or rendered in different colors or scales in order to reveal hidden messages or to draw attention to the relationship between language and meaning. Her paintings are included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. “I think of language almost like these little found objects that sort of suggest themselves to me,” she says. “Sometimes I don’t really go looking for them as much as they’re just there. You have to be in a certain frame of mind to pluck them out of the air, to make them yours. They could be hanging around and maybe I don’t see them. Your head has to be in a certain place.”