“Delightfully absurd...”
-Steven Heller, The New York Times
I think these photographs might mean happiness. They are made by softness and cotton."
-Nicholas, 3th grade student, PS84 NY
If Hannibal Lecter, Martin Margiela and a blind speed freak had a three-way in a Build-A-Bear workshop, these creatures would be their mutant offspring.
-Sarah Verdone, Paper Magazine
"130+ years after Thomas Eakins portrayed a group of bloody surgeons removing a tumor from a patient's thigh in The Gross Clinic (oil on canvas), Kent Rogowski turns our emblems of childhood comfort inside out. One of Eakins most famous and successful paintings, The Gross Clinic was rejected by the jury of the 1876 Centennial exhibition as 'unsightly' and eventually sold to a medical school for the paltry sum of $200. Perhaps Mr. Rogowski should sell his pictures to a day care center."
-Alec Soth, photographer
“Though the subjects of these portraits...aren’t human, they seem to exude as much personality and feeling as any living, breathing thing.”
Jen Trolio, Readymade Magazine
"Each of these pieces speaks of another place in the psyche... I wonder how much these pieces have been transformed by the person they stayed with."
-Roger Ballen, photographer
"soft and fierce"
-Calvin Tsao, Architect
Rife with nostalgia and allusions to consumerism, childhood and sentimentality, among other heady topics, Bears... becomes a meditation on its subject.
-Ami Kealoha, Cool Hunting
“Mr Rogowski has become the Damien Hirst of the toy cupboard...”
Brian Sibley, Writer
“Part scientist, part sorcerer, Rogowski re-animates the bears as haunting reminders of childhood’s complexities.”
-Blyth Sheldon, V Magazine
"Bears is a strange book... Kent Rogowski and powerHouse Books have combined to create what might be the nightmare of any child under eight."
-Andrew Kozma, Arts Houston
"downright terrifying.”
-Gwynne Watkins, Babble