Susan Rothenberg was
born in Buffalo, New York in 1945. She received a BFA from Cornell
University. Her early work—large acrylic, figurative paintings—came
to prominence in the 1970s New York art world, a time and place
almost completely dominated and defined by Minimalist aesthetics
and theories. The first body of work for which she became known
centered on life-sized images of horses. Glyph-like and iconic,
these images are not so much abstracted as pared down to their
most essential elements. The horses, along with fragmented body
parts (heads, eyes, and hands) are almost totemic, like primitive
symbols, and serve as formal elements through which Rothenberg
investigated the meaning, mechanics, and essence of painting. Rothenberg’s
paintings since the 1990s reflect her move from New York to New
Mexico, her adoption of oil painting, and her new-found interest
in using the memory of observed and experienced events (a riding
accident, a near-fatal bee sting, walking the dog, a game of poker
or dominoes) as an armature for creating a painting. These scenes
excerpted from daily life, whether highlighting an untoward event
or a moment of remembrance, come to life through Rothenberg’s
thickly layered and nervous brushwork. A distinctive characteristic
of these paintings is a tilted perspective in which the vantage
point is located high above the ground. A common experience in
the New Mexico landscape, this unexpected perspective invests the
work with an eerily objective psychological edge. Susan Rothenberg
received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts
and the Skowhegan Medal for Painting. She has had one-person exhibitions
at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Dallas Museum of Art; Hirshhorn
Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Los Angeles County
Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Walker Art
Center, Minneapolis; and the Tate Gallery, London, among others.
For additional biographic & bibliographic information:
Sperone Westwater Gallery, New York | Waddington Galleries, London |
