Michael Bühler-Rose earned his BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2005. For his MFA, he studied with Andrea Robbins and Max Becher at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he also received a Fulbright Fellowship to India, graduating in 2008. Currently a part-time critic at Rhode Island School of Design, Bühler-Rose is a recent SMFA Alumni Traveling Scholars Award recipient, and will have an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in spring 2010. Also an active curator, Bühler-Rose recently organized The Form Itself, shown at Priska C. Juschka Fine Arts in New York, NY and Opposing Photographers as part of Young Curators: New Visions, at the Bond Street Gallery in Brooklyn, NY.

Artist Statement

"Constructing the Exotic "

This series explores conventions of the figure in painting and photography through the lens of historical, colonial, and native art.

Placing the unfamiliar within the familiar opens a door to questions concerning the identity of the “exotic other.” In these images, Western women raised in India or simply born into its socio-religious heritage become, in one sense, the “other.” Their placement in the familiar contemporary Western cultural landscape draws the viewer into their world and pulls at the seams of notions of the exotic.

Click on each image for larger version and caption.