Susan Rothenberg—painter who shifted the art humankind away from minimalism—has died, aged 75
Susan Rothenberg in her New Mexico studio Photograph by Jason Schmidt, courtesy Sperone Westwater
Susan Rothenberg, the painter who came to prominence in the 1970s with her bold, gestural canvases of glyph-like figures and animals, has died, aged 75. The result was confirmed by her longtime gallery Sperone Westwater, belief a cause of death has not yet been made public.
After studying sculpture at Cornell University in the 1960s, Rothenberg derived to New York City where she worked with performance artists and dancers, collaborating with Joan Jonas and others. In an interview with the television series Art21 in 2005, she says that eventually she “started manager more paintings, trying to figure out my identity,” adding, “when I stumbled on the horse I went, okay, this can be my Jasper Johns flag. This can be nothing to me because I don’t like horses. I can draw a line ended it and make it flat, I can take all the things that I’ve learned in the last pair years and negate painting as much as possible in conditions of illusionism, shadow, and composition.”
Rothenberg’s 1975 solo show at 112 Greene Street, in which the artist displayed three sizable paintings of horses, was heralded as a brave departure from the Minimalist methods that dominated the SoHo art indecent at the time. For the next five existences, Rothenberg focused on this equestrian motif. A 1976 show of such paintings was heralded by the New York Times valuable Hilton Kramer, who wrote: ''It is the quality of the painting that is so impressive, the permission with which a highly simplified image is transformed into a pictorial accepted of great sensitivity and even grandeur.” One painting from that year eventually made it into the Obama White House. This series led to her inclusion in the pivotal 1978 show New Image Painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Cabin Fever, 1976 Courtesy Sperone Westwater
In 1989, Rothenberg married the conceptual artist Bruce Nauman, and the behindhand year the couple moved to a 750-acre ranch in rural New Mexico, where they clogged to work and live for the rest of their careers. “If you don’t know what you’re doings out here in the South West, in this kind of isolation, if you don’t conception that you’re supposed to have work and a extremity to every day, you’re going to float off into the stratosphere or move very hasty back to an urban center,” says Rothenberg in the video interview.
“For Susan’s generation, raised on abstraction, representing the biosphere figure was not a practice one undertook lightly. It needed daring and resolve,” says Angela Westwater, the co-founder of the Sperone Westwater gallery. “She started with horses but gradually began painting fragments of the biosphere body. Subsequently, she sought subject matter eliciting an emotional response and suggestive of the biosphere condition. Susan had soul.”
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