Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works

Susan Rothenberg
American (b. 1945)
from LITTLE HEADS AND HANDS series(1985)
Woodcut on paper
18" x 30"

STYLE: Printmaking,
New Image,
Neo-Expressionism

Susan Rothenberg is credited with being one of the artists in the 70s and 80s who brought painting and drawing back into the limelight. She uses vaguely recognizable figures in her work, questioning their relationship to her canvas, making them mysterious and filled with psychological tension.

The movements of the 70s that Rothenberg broke away from—geometric abstraction, minimalism, conceptual art—were often characterized by "cool" attitude and slick surfaces. Rothenberg is neither cool nor slick. Her surfaces are agitated, her brushwork animated. Like many contemporary artists, Rothenberg is rediscovering the act of painting and inventing her own relationship to it.

In her printmaking, Rothenberg translates the concerns of her painting to the multiple format. She has worked with many influential printmaking studios, including Gemini G.E.L. and Graphicstudio.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Lisbet Nilson, ARTnews feature, 2/84
"Ever since the New York art world discovered her acrylic painting partly based on horse forms in the mid-70s, Rothenberg has been a tellingly paradoxical presence within it. It is not just that the artist, who...was working with a brushy, insistent stroke well before painting...came back into vogue...Rothenberg...managed to produce work that was painterly and sensual—with an intensely personal emotional charge—and to keep it as cool and intellectual, as spare and formal, as 70s taste demanded...her ability to invest the canvas with feeling without being sloppily expressionistic...'It's air and space rather than just paint.'...When finally there was no horse left, Rothenberg turned to the human head and hand...She still prefers to work primarily in black and white—using accents of red, perhaps, or cobalt blue—because she says, she is interested in form and finds that color fractures form..."

Roberta Smith, NYTimes review, 5/22/92
"Ms. Rothenberg's new works, which feature energetically painted, often violent encounters between animals, mark no radical departure in style for the artist. Rather, they liberate that style, both technically and thematically, bringing it to maturity...During the 80s, the artist's surfaces became roelike blizzards of brushwork. These monotonous fields might be inhabited by enormous abbreviated heads and hands in gestures of disembodied despair...Such motifs usually looked forced, and seldom achieved the existential profundity they aimed for...Painted in the artist's characteristic semi-abstract style, the new canvases feature blurred, fragmented forms that alternately race across and emerge from thickly painted white backgrounds...the tales they tell—darwinian narratives of violence and survival—have a visceral rawness that her work has often lacked...While smaller versions of the artist's characteristic heads and hands are sometimes visible, the people in these paintings function primarily as onlookers, helpless before the spectacle of instinctual violence...the action almost seems to take place in slow motion, the way real accidents are sometimes experienced...the feeling that everything is careening out of control...she is the most genuinely Expressionist artist of the Neo-Expressionist generation...Focusing on daily strife in the animal kingdom, she implies, without fanfare, that most of life is beyond our control, and leaves us to ponder the human plight."

Deborah Solomon, Wall Street Journal, 12/8/92
"In her paintings from the 90s, Ms. Rothenberg has stumbled on to something new by returning to some of her earlier motifs—including heads, hands, and assorted animal parts. But now the heads are tiny and seem to be whispering, the hands are frail, and the horses appear as barely recognizable fragments slipping off the edges of mostly white canvases. It's as if she wants to summon the emotional power of her early horse paintings without actually painting the animal. Picasso once said that it's necessary to copy other artists, but pathetic to copy yourself. Ms. Rothenberg's most recent work makes us feel how lonely and poignant it can be to have painted an image you can't go back to again."