Dedicated to the work of Susan Rothenberg (Buffalo, 1945 - Galisteo, 2020) is Hauser & Wirth Gallery’s new exhibition at its New York location, the first on the artist organized by Hauser & Wirth that features 14 paintings, including rarely and never before exhibited canvases, spanning the artist’s entire career. The exhibition, titled Susan Rothenberg. The Weather, curated by Alexis Lowry, runs from Sept. 4 to Oct. 18. In addition to canonical masterpieces, the exhibition features works that Rothenberg lived with and hid for decades. Taken together, these works offer an unusually intimate look at the restless vastness of Rothenberg’s psyche, revealing, in turn, the raw emotional depth that defined his singular vision.
For more than fifty years, Rothenberg developed a powerful pictorial language driven by an intrinsic sense of formal rigor and unerring insight. From the asteroidal impact of his radical break with minimalist conventions to the ghostly apparitions of his latest paintings, Rothenberg has consistently redefined the medium, placing himself at the center of the global renaissance of painting that began in the mid-1970s. Rothenberg has codified in his work a fierce, sometimes cryptic language of resistance and otherness, establishing himself as a model of artistic integrity and self-determination. In doing so, he developed work that has served as inspiration for generations of painters.
The exhibition seeks to highlight the poignant and personal craftsmanship of each of Rothenberg’s canvases, their tactile immediacy. Using vigorous brushstrokes, the American artist created a kind of atmospheric pressure in each canvas -- what she often called “the weather,” which gives the exhibition its title -- from which her enigmatic figures emerged. From the outset, the bold outlines of Rothenberg’s horses, silhouetted against agitated monochromatic backgrounds, resembled glyphs, charged with a primal force. Successive bodies, both human and animal, are subjected to pressure, bending, breaking, multiplying and dissolving.
Critic Peter Schjeldahl once observed, “The paintings strike higher than the viscera. Their effect is at once frenzied and icy, a frozen violence that is very reminiscent of the head, without being intoxicating, because they are firmly composed and cunningly painted.”
From the ghost of his handprints in the margins of Outline (1978) to the bold lines of Red Head (1981)-a tribute to the artist’s tools-Rothenberg’s literal and figurative touch is unmistakable throughout his work. The floating heads of Las Blancas (1996-1997), painted after a near-death experience caused by a bee sting, show her adrift in the liminal space between consciousness and mortality, while the intertwined, noisy bodies of All Night Long (2000-2001) pulsate with energy. And in Untitled (Green Hands with Band) (2018), painted near the end of Rothenberg’s life, the grasping hands convey a sense of urgency and elegiacism. Here, as in all the works in the exhibition, the essence of the artist, as a subject that encompasses multitudes, radiates.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Hauser & Wirth Publishers will also publish Susan Rothenberg. The Weather, a richly illustrated monograph tracing Rothenberg’s career, from the monumental paintings of horses that brought her to prominence in the 1970s, to the fragmented limbs and moving figures that defined her output in the 1980s, to the natural drama of the New Mexico desert landscape that permeated her work throughout the 1990s. Introduced by exhibition curator Alexis Lowry, reproductions of Rothenberg’s paintings are accompanied by commentaries by writers, artists, and thinkers, while a meticulously documented biography offers insight into Rothenberg’s extraordinary life.
Susan Charna Rothenberg was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1945. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) degree from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 1967, after studying painting and sculpture. During and after college, Rothenberg traveled to Greece and Spain, respectively, briefly attending the Corcoran School of Art, and then moved to New York in 1969, where he lived for the next two decades.
Despite widespread critical acclaim for his work, Rothenberg’s art was the subject of only two major anthological exhibitions during his lifetime. In 1992, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, a museum Rothenberg had visited growing up in Buffalo, presented Susan Rothenberg: Paintings and Drawings, with more than 80 works exploring the relationship between the artist’s drawings and paintings from the beginning of her career. In 2009, Michael Auping organized the exhibition Susan Rothenberg: Moving in Place at the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth. The goal of that exhibition was to trace the development of the artist’s career from a more holistic and formal perspective, identifying her distinctive approach to the organization of pictorial space regardless of subject matter, going well beyond her earliest and best-known paintings of horses.
Rothenberg’s works are held in many important public and private collections, including: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
|
|
| New York, at Hauser & Wirth exhibition dedicated to Susan Rothenberg |
Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.
