Susan Rothenberg

Nearly twenty years after her last solo exhibition in London, Thomas Dane Gallery is proud to showcase a rare presentation of works by Susan Rothenberg (1945–2020). The five paintings on show span almost the entire career of the groundbreaking American painter. This exhibition is organised in collaboration with Sperone Westwater, New York, the exclusive representative of the artist and her estate since 1987.

 

The great horses loomed, ranging in form from crude cartoonish-ness to hints of plausible equine anatomy. All seethed with emotion – the isotope that had gone missing from the mandarin styles of the day...

- Peter Schjeldahl

 

Indigo (2011–16) reveals Rothenberg as a colourist – her love of reds, dark blues, and all shades of white, and the way she would ‘dirty’ her colours, never using them pure out of a tube. Pack Rat Fall (2016–19), one of the very last works she completed, sees Rothenberg looking at her immediate surroundings, to the sincerity and honesty of nature. As Rothenberg put it, ‘I think artists almost always end up turning to what’s around them, what’s in their environment or outside their window.’

Biography

Susan Rothenberg (1945–2020) was born in Buffalo, New York, and received her BFA from Cornell University in 1967. Rothenberg had numerous solo exhibitions internationally, including early presentations at Kunsthalle Basel (1981–82), the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1982), and an exhibition organised by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that travelled to seven institutions in the United States and abroad including Tate, London (1983–85). Others include a retrospective organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, that travelled to the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., Saint Louis Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Seattle Art Museum, and the Dallas Museum of Art (1992–94); a survey at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Monterrey, Mexico (1996–97); Susan Rothenberg: Paintings from the Nineties at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1999); Susan Rothenberg: Drawings and Prints at Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, which travelled to the Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe (1998–99); and Moving in Place, a survey exhibition organized by Michael Auping at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, which travelled to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, and the Miami Art Museum (2009–11). A survey exhibition organised by Hall Art Foundation is currently on view at Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg, Germany, until 21 August 2022, and is accompanied by a catalogue forthcoming in February 2022.

Rothenberg’s work is in important public and private collections, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Hall Collection; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; and Tate, UK.

Notes:

(1) Peter Schjeldahl, ‘Susan Rothenberg’s Asteroidal Impact on the New York Art World’, New Yorker Magazine, May 2020.

Unless otherwise noted, all images © 2022 The Estate of Susan Rothenberg / DACS, London, courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York 

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