Style
Since the mid-1970s, Rothenberg has been widely recognized as one of the most innovative and independent artists of the contemporary period. (In 2010, David Belcher in the New York Times said comparisons between the painter and Georgia O'Keeffe had "become hard to avoid.") From her early years in SoHo through her move to New Mexico's desert landscape, Rothenberg has remained as influenced and challenged by her physical surroundings as she is by artistic issues and her own personal experiences. In addition to her earliest horse paintings, Rothenberg has taken on numerous forms as subject matter. These include dancing figures, heads and bodies, animals, and atmospheric landscapes. Rothenberg's visceral canvases have continued to evolve, as she explores the boundary between figural representation and abstraction; her work also examines the role of color and light, and the translation of her personal experience to a painterly surface. Rothenberg’s first solo exhibition in New York in 1975, consisting of three large-scale paintings of horses, was heralded for introducing imagery into minimalist abstraction, while bringing a new sensitivity to figuration. The critic Peter Schjeldahl called the show “a eureka,” stating that “the large format of the pictures was a gesture of ambition,” and that “the mere reference to something really existing was astonishing.”
Read more about this topic: Susan Rothenberg
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“The authoritarian child-rearing style so often found in working-class families stems in part from the fact that parents see around them so many young people whose lives are touched by the pain and delinquency that so often accompanies a life of poverty. Therefore, these parents live in fear for their children’s future—fear that they’ll lose control, that the children will wind up on the streets or, worse yet, in jail.”
—Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)