Susan Rothenberg
08 September - 29 October 2011
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SUSAN ROTHENBERG
8 September - 29 October, 2011
Sperone Westwater is pleased to present an exhibition of thirteen new
paintings by Susan Rothenberg, the artist’s tenth solo show at the
gallery since 1987. Rothenberg continues to challenge and extend
painterly conventions in her spatial and distorted compositions as well
as in her exploration of light, color, form and movement. The works
feature fragments of the human body, such as heads and hands, along with
imagery of dogs and ravens. Juxtaposed against minimal yet heavily
worked backgrounds, parts and partial figures are dispersed across the
picture planes or cropped at the edge of the canvases. Bodies become
shapes, and the tension between figuration and abstraction is
heightened.
Rothenberg’s first solo exhibition at 112 Greene Street in 1975,
consisting of three large-scale painting of horses, was heralded for
introducing imagery into minimalist abstraction and bringing a new
sensitivity to figuration. For this show, Rothenberg continues to use
animals as surrogates for the human body, transforming the
representation of the figure into a study of space and form.
The silhouette of a black bird with its beak open in, Raven (2009-10),
dominates the height of the painting. The raven is slightly off-center
and juxtaposed against a white, scumbled background. In Ring Necks,
Covering (2011), Rothenberg paints two doves at the edge of the canvas,
perched on branches that extend into the picture plane, bisecting it
diagonally.
White on White Head (2009-10) depicts the profile of a large head
outlined in grey and black paint. As in many Rothenberg paintings,
figurative and abstract elements merge in the compositional space,
leaving little room for a narrative. In the large-scale work Strangers
in the Night (2009-10), two disembodied heads share a dark, layered
background.
Since 1975, the artist has had numerous solo exhibitions in the United
States and abroad. Her work is in the collections of over forty major
public institutions worldwide. Important solo exhibitions include a
retrospective organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo that
traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; The Saint Louis Art
Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Seattle Art Museum; and the
Dallas Museum of Art (1992-1994); a retrospective at the Museo de Arte
Contemporáneo in Monterrey, Mexico (1996); "Susan Rothenberg: Paintings
from the 90's" at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1999); and an
exhibition of paintings and drawings at the Museum of Art at Cornell
University that traveled to The Contemporary Museum in Honolulu and the
Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe (1998-99). The most recent survey, "Moving
in Place”, was organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and
traveled to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico and the
Miami Art Museum (2009 – 2011).
www.speronewestwater.com
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