Susan Rothenberg - Style

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.”