Just got this email from Sperone Westwater Gallery:
It is with sadness that we announce the passing of artist Susan Rothenberg.
“Since
1987, I have been privileged to show Susan Rothenberg’s work and to
experience close up her passion for and commitment to making art. As a
pioneer, she extended the boundaries of painting—especially for other
women artists,” says Angela Westwater, founding partner of Sperone
Westwater.
Rothenberg
rose to prominence in 1975 with her first solo exhibition at
alternative art space 112 Greene Street. Consisting of three large-scale
paintings of horses, it was heralded for introducing imagery into
minimalist abstraction and bringing a new sensitivity to figuration. A
group of her iconic horse paintings was included in “New Image Painting”
at the Whitney in 1978, followed by “Zeitgeist” at the
Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin in 1982, where she was the only woman
included in a group of 45 artists.
Though
often associated with this series of work, Rothenberg only painted
horses for a short time in her career, and through the 1980s quickly
moved on to explore other subjects, including heads, hands and other
fragments of the human form, which morphed into a series of figures in
motion–dancers, vaulters, spinners and jugglers. Rothenberg lived and
worked in New York for nearly 20 years until 1990 when she moved to New
Mexico with her husband Bruce Nauman. In this new setting, Rothenberg
drew imagery from her daily life and physical surroundings in the New
Mexico desert. Here she continued to draw upon her longtime ability to
challenge and expand painterly conventions in her distinctive way of
organizing pictorial space and her exploration of light, color, form and
movement.
On the occasion of her exhibition at Sperone Westwater this past January, Alfred Mac Adam wrote in The Brooklyn Rail:
“The only thing we can ask of this great artist is that she never stop
working and never abandon the commitment to radical ambiguity that fuels
our own creative and imaginative responses to her images.”
Here is a link to a piece I wrote about her recent NY show:
http://the-gallery-guy.blogspot.com/2020/01/susan-rothenberg-at-sperone-westwater.html
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