Divination, Mark Making, Boxing, & Drawing: "Tracey Rose" at Ruby City
Opening June 6 in San Antonio, Texas, “Tracey Rose” offers viewers an intimate look at the artist’s groundbreaking multidisciplinary practice including performance and drawings.
Ruby City presents Tracey Rose, a solo exhibition by the internationally acclaimed South African artist, opening on June 6. Featuring the visceral video performance TKO (2000) alongside a rarely seen suite of 62 drawings shown together for the first time, the exhibition offers an intimate look into Rose’s groundbreaking multidisciplinary practice.
Created during her 2000 residency at Artpace, the works explore endurance, identity, vulnerability, and transformation through boxing, gesture, intuitive drawing, and repetition. In TKO, Rose repeatedly strikes a heavy bag fitted with cameras, transforming physical impact into a meditation on creativity, visibility, and resistance. Developed after two years of boxing training in Johannesburg, the work channels bodily movement into acts of mark making through motion and sound.
The drawings created at the same time reveal another deeply personal dimension of Rose’s practice. Produced compulsively during a turbulent period in her life, the works function as emotional maps and acts of divination, filled with fragmented figures, symbols, and gestural marks. Together, the drawings and video performance illuminate Rose’s ongoing investigation into how the body can hold memory, anxiety, resilience, and the unknowable possibilities of the future.
Through exhibitions like Tracey Rose, Ruby City connects audiences to globally significant contemporary artists and ideas while fostering reflection, dialogue, and meaningful access to contemporary art. Founded by collector and artist Linda Pace, Ruby City is dedicated to creating space for curiosity, connection, and cultural exchange through free admission and ambitious exhibitions that engage urgent social and artistic questions.
Tracey Rose will be on view from June 6, 2026 to May 9, 2027 at Ruby City in San Antonio, Texas. An opening exhibition walkthrough and reception will be held on Saturday, June 6.
About the artist:
Tracey Rose (b. 1974, Durban, South Africa) is an internationally acclaimed artist known for her performative practice spanning video, photography, installation, and digital media. Her often anarchic and carnivalesque work explores post-coloniality, race, gender, sexuality, and repatriation. Rose studied at the Johannesburg Art Foundation, earned a B.A. in Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1996, and later received an MFA from Goldsmiths College, University of London, in 2007. Based in Johannesburg, she has exhibited widely at major international venues including the Venice Biennale, Documenta 14, Tate Liverpool, and the Queens Museum.
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