Madeleine de Proust (Proust's Madeleine), Paris 2021 by Roberta Fineberg is a mixed media panorama on cotton rag paper. The art is 20.5" x 26.5" with a window mat. Signed, dated, titled on front of work by the artist. Edition of 3, 1 a/p
A photograph of a Parisian garden is reimagined with repeating geometric patterns and textures representing a symmetrical optical illusion. The contrast between the sepia-tinted and black-and-white images reveals a poetic divide between past and present, old and new, both ephemeral and enduring.Â
The inverted imagery evokes memories of smells, tastes, sounds, and sensations of “things past.” Beginning with the sepia-toned photograph of the Palais Royale shot in 1990 by the photographer, RF juxtaposes the identical black and white photograph for a conceptual trompe l'oeil.
 Provenance: RF Studio
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Artist's Bio:
Roberta Fineberg (RF) is a New York-based visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores serendipity, experimentation, and the evolution of ideas through color, material, and process. Working across photography, drawing, installation, video, and abstraction, she investigates themes of impermanence, play, memory, and transformation. Embracing chance as an essential creative force, her work invites viewers to reconsider the relationships between observation, experience, and the physical world.
Fineberg’s exhibitions include Women of Spirit at Zurcher Gallery, New York (2025); Gallery128, New York (2025); Collecting: An Art Fair at Westbeth Gallery, New York (2024); Sojourner Gallery, New York (2022); Phyllis Harriman Gallery (2020, 2022); CADAF Online Art Fair (2020); Gallery122, New York (2018); Curate NY (2013); and Photos, Femmes, Féminisme at Paris Photo (2010). Her work is held in public and private collections, including portraits of women writers at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand in Paris. In 2022, her photograph Double Helix was featured in Sotheby’s Contemporary Discoveries preview exhibition in New York.
Recent commissions include twenty pigment prints from her Roman God(dess) series for the Orient Express Hotel in Rome (2025). Her work Union, from the Butterfly Series, was selected for Butterfly: Exploring the World of Lepidoptera (Phaidon, 2025), and in 2026 three works from the series were released as curated digital editions on Sedition.
RF began her career in Paris in the 1980s as an editorial photographer and freelance writer. Her photographs have appeared in international publications including Le Monde, Paris Match, Ms., Jeune Afrique, among others. She is also the author of City Riders: A Story of Riding and Friendship (Howell/Macmillan, 1997).
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