Rita McBride

Rita McBride (b.1960, Des Moines, Iowa, USA) lives and works between Dusseldorf, Germany, and Los Angeles, USA. She studied at Bard College, New York, and later obtained her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Since 2003 she has been a professor at the Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf, where she has been the Director since 2013. 

For Liverpool Biennial 2016 McBride has created a large-scale light installation in Toxteth Reservoir that acts as a portal between real and fictional worlds. Elsewhere, McBride’s Perfiles depict the outline of houses in Pompeii, a city in the South of Italy that was buried in metres of ash and pumice after the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD. Sculptural memories of buildings consumed by time, the Perfiles are distributed across the exhibition.

McBride’s work has been the subject of numerous solo museum exhibitions, the most recent of which were held at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico (2013) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, USA (2014-15). Currently, The Kestnergesellschaft in Hanover, Germany (2015) and the Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, Germany are collaborating on a solo exhibition and publication that will be on view through Spring 2016.

Rita McBride at Liverpool Biennial 2016

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Portal, 2016
16x 1W/520nm KVANT semiconductor diode laser module
Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial
Exhibited at Toxteth Reservoir

Perfiles: Fortuna Virilis, 2010, Sansovino, 2010, Aqueduct of Adrian, 2010, Pantheon 1, 2010, Sminthius, 2010, Treatro Marcello, 2010
Bronze and marble
Exhibited at Cains Brewery