Susan rothenberg written biography

In her mind she had the vague desire to paint something simple, magical, and universal like the prehistoric cave paintings of animals. Despite the serendipitous beginning, Rothenberg soon realized that her horse was a surrogate for the human figure.

Susan rothenberg written biography: Rothenberg is a contemporary painter known

But her lifesize, powerful animals represent living spirits without the specifics of age, sex, or personality that accompany nearly every depiction of human beings. It was during this period that Rothenberg was swept up by the whirlwind of the New York art world. Critics raved, art dealers lined up to exhibit Rothenberg's work at one-woman shows, and of course the prices of her canvasses went up.

The attention strained her marriage, there were problems with alcohol, and in she was divorced from Trakas, an event that fueled her work with an even greater intensity. Soon bones, human heads, and other body parts began creeping into her work, usually depicted in stark black imagery on solid white canvasses. If you want to use modern talk, I would say things were about my energies being blocked and the flow being screwed up….

You know, the whole choked-up mess of separating from some-body you care for and a child being involved. That's what those drawings are about. As things in her personal life became more settled, Rothenberg continued to enjoy critical and commercial susan rothenberg written biography at the top of the New York scene in the s. She worked relatively slowly, spending hours in her studio conjuring images from her subconscious, drawing them, and tacking them to the walls.

After settling on an image or group of images, she would then work it out very loosely on canvas, and pause, sometimes for hours or days, to sit in her rocking chair and contemplate the work. Working in brief bouts of intense, kinetic brushwork, pausing again, and so on, Rothenberg would finally finish the piece. Once during the s she created an image that looked startlingly like the famed early-twentieth century Dutch artist Piet Mondrian.

Rothenberg had been an admirer of Mondrian's, an early Expressionist who painted for many years in a severe abstract style. Her paintings "Tattoo, Mondrian" and "Mondrian Dancing" grew out of this particular phase. In Rothenberg was introduced to the New Mexican sculptor and artist Bruce Nauman and a romance flourished. It was a long-distance relationship for some time—Nauman was as devoted to his quiet life in the rural desert as Rothenberg was to cosmopolitan New York.

But when her daughter left home, the artist decided that a break from her surroundings might lead to new revelations in her work, and she joined and later married Nauman in New Mexico. The pair designed and built their own house on a acre ranch, where they now raise horses, rising each morning to do farm chores before parting ways to their separate studios for the day.

Critics have continued to uphold the high quality of Rothenberg's work over the last decade. Though her output has diminished and her work has shown less frequently in New York, a major exhibition of her work at that city's Sperone Westwater gallery in did show that desert life had introduced subtle but definite changes in Rothenberg's painting.

The field thus painted is dry and brushy as a back pasture. But there is nothing naturalistic about it.

Susan rothenberg written biography: Susan Rothenberg () was born in

Notes [ edit ]. Retrieved June 14, Grove Art Online. The New York Times. ISSN Retrieved May 21, In Randy Rosen; Catherine C. Brower eds. Making Their Mark. Women Artists Move into the Mainstream, Abbeville Press. ISBN Retrieved February 5, Retrieved April 19, Retrieved May 30, July 2, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Retrieved May 15, Retrieved June 9, May 19, The painting asks questions about our identity, as such how we exist in relationships and duality, as well as individuals.

The work is humorously titled Bugfuckas the larger figure resembles an arachnid of some sort. However, the larger figure could also be interpreted as an archetypal female goddess with the erect 'male' figure poking out from her side. The painting is reminiscent of many other works by Rothenberg whereby she inserts one living thing inside another one.

For example, very recently she made a picture of two dogs heads on a yellow background with the smaller head positioned inside a larger one. The same technique has been used to show hands within hands and heads within heads and as such points towards the idea of birth, of a small replica coming from a larger model. From within the deep crevice, images form to help fathom the mysteries of our existence.

The slim figure of an austerely dressed and bespectacled man hovers near the front of the picture plane, rendered in shades of blue and gray. His trousers, hands, and shadow are a deeper, night-sky blue while glimmers of pale gold brushstrokes illuminate the top right of the canvas. The figure stares off into space, conveying a sense of self-reflection and general intensity.

He only barely emerges from the painted penumbras of which he is an intrinsic part, suggesting a private wrestling with darkness, as well as with the processes of art. This is not an anonymous individual but rather the famously meticulous Dutch painter, Piet Mondrian. The first in a series of Mondrian paintings, this work essentially came out of the ether, or at lease once again out of Rothenberg's deep intuition.

The artist recalled going into her studio and forcing herself to do a drawing, and when she began sketching, Mondrian's face materialized. She was surprised, as she wasn't intending to paint him and recalls, I was "just moving my hand on the paper. It was like an Ouija board. The painting bears likeness to the Giacometti sketches that Rothenberg admired and introduces the European philosophy of existentialism.

The juxtaposition between Mondrian and the force of art, as well as light versus dark swirling around, result in a mesmerizing but slightly unsettling work. Critic Chase Madar aptly sums up the final painting and its prefatory drawing by calling it a "passionate, intellectually challenging commentary by a post-AbEx American painter on an arch-classicist European.

By the s Rothenberg had moved away from painting horses and had begun to turn her attention to the human figure. It features a man's head and torso with the latter attenuated like a Giacometti sculpture or susan rothenberg written biography tail that curves into a U shape and stretches to the top of the canvas. The figure and the background are all in varying shades of blue, evoking Picasso's early period of intense human observation.

Rothenberg's brushstrokes are thick, lush; the result of her application of paint, the bright blue shades, and the silent strangeness of the man is a sensuous, organic image and one that evokes the dreamy depths of the sea or space. The figure appears like a merman and as such an interesting precursor for the imaginations behind the films Avatar and more recently, The Shape of Water.

In the eighties Rothenberg was associated with Neo-Expressionism, a movement of mostly male painters whose work was a middle finger to the ubiquitous claim in the art world that painting was dead. It was characterized by the inclusion of the figure; dynamic application of paint to the canvas; and not a little boldness and bombast. Art historian Irving Sandler wrote that the Neo-Expressionists "cultivated and paraded their individuality, feeling free to paint their fantasies, memories, fears, hang-ups, and whatever else they desired.

Her work, critic Hilton Kramer stated in a glowing review, "is the kind of painting that invests every area of the canvas with feeling without ever spilling over into Expressionist abandon. A soft white rectangle floats on a mottled red-and-white sea, while nearly two-dozen eyes hover around the outskirts of the rectangle or move across its midline.

The eyes are individually lustrous and alert, but collectively they disconcert as they glance in all different directions or, in their putative movement across the canvas, pause in momentary befuddlement. Divided from the body as a whole and instead presented as fragments, the eyes "susan rothenberg written biography" the practice of Kiki Smith and ultimately convey greater human presence than if all bodily parts were connected and visible.

An isolated eye is also a long standing and greatly recurring motif of the Surrealists, it is their symbol and comment for all that we hold hidden within, for our unconscious, our soul. Despite the presence of the hard-edged rectangle, the piece is much less controlled and much more organic and psychologically haunting than much of the artist's earlier work.

Rothenberg explained the impetus of the work to curator Joan Simon, saying that the eyes were her mother's while she was dying: "They were everywhere but no center. Some Navajo saddle blankets have an empty center. They are called 'ghost rugs. The void of the white shape and the eyes separated from the body convey Rothenberg's anguish at her mother's painful passage from life to death.

Some of Rothenberg's most recent work shows the painter applying her formidable talent for "painterly" brushwork and nebulous boundaries between content and form to the subject of birds, and more specifically, to ravens. White Raven is a massive work, ten feet wide and painted with all the frosty gray tones of a classic Northern Renaissance winter scene.

A screeching white raven which does not, of course, exist in nature is suspended in the void and occupies the left side of the canvas, its head almost cut off by the edge. Critic Faye Hirsch described the eerie image as "white on white, an eyeless, wingless avian, beak open as if screeching, is hurled through the restless ether.

Susan rothenberg written biography: This award-winning study explores the life

However, as Rothenberg's animals have long been her surrogates for the human body, here there is an evocation of existential terror similar to the portrait of Mondrian - of being unmoored, of one's psyche untethered from narrative and memory. The raven is sometimes culturally associated with death, or the transition between life and death, and as such it is interesting that Rothenberg paints such a creature in the latter phase of life.

Susan Rothenberg was born in Buffalo, New York in and spent most of her youth there. To respect your accessibility settings autoplay is disabled. Susan Rothenberg — For four decades Susan Rothenberg has depicted animal and human forms in paintings, drawings, and prints that straddle the divide between representation and abstraction. Wikipedia entry Introduction Susan Charna Rothenberg January 20, — May 18, was an American contemporary painter, printmaker, sculptor, and draughtswoman.

Susan rothenberg written biography: SUSAN ROTHENBERG by Joan

Getty record Introduction Many of Rothenberg's mature works, for which she has become renowned, depict horses. Has image On view. Randomize Reset. Classification Prints 11 Paintings 3 Drawings 2. Credit line. Year range.