Table for a Rose
NYC MOCA is pleased to present Table for a Rose, a work by Paris-based artist Pauline-Rose Dumas. Created as the final sculpture in advance of her solo exhibition A Rose is a Rose at Hesse Flatow, Table for a Rose functions as both a summation and a preview. The work takes its title from the artist’s studio table, where fragments, dye tests, and material samples for the upcoming exhibition had accumulated alongside remnants from earlier works, including those from her solo presentation at Anne-Laure Buffard Gallery in Paris. In gathering these scraps into a single installation, Dumas transforms the studio table into both an object and a site of potential narrative.
The title also recalls the artist’s own name, Pauline-Rose, while echoing Gertrude Stein’s use of repetition in “Sacred Emily”, where language accrues meaning through return, variation, and insistence. Here, repeated forms, suspended lines, and gridded color tests—resembling both textile swatches and Post-it notes—suggest a living work that oscillates between process and completion. Like much of Dumas’s practice, Table for a Rose brings together forging, drawing, photography, and textile processes through a shared language of line, while its conceptual and material engagement with sewing echoes Tribeca’s history of textile manufacturing. Ultimately, Table for a Rose offers a portrait of the studio as an organic and evolving space, where fragments of works continue to accumulate and reassemble, living on in one another like DNA.