The Hall Art Foundation is pleased to announce a survey by the internationally acclaimed American artist Susan Rothenberg (1945-2020) to be held in its galleries in Reading, Vermont. Throughout the past fifty years, Rothenberg was an independent figure who continued to challenge and extend painterly conventions, meshing abstraction with representation and confounding figure and ground. This show will include nearly 20 paintings that trace the evolution of Rothenberg’s figurative, emotionally charged and gestural style during the 30 years she was living and working in New Mexico.

After moving from New York to New Mexico in 1990, Rothenberg’s subject matter reflected her new physical surroundings—animals and the landscape. In works such as Dog and Snake (2004-05), animal imagery inhabits intensely worked fields of color, where bodies are fragmented and abstracted. Painted in a palette also influenced by the desert landscape, these works continued to convey a dynamic sense of movement across the picture plane.

Towards the end of the 2000s, Rothenberg returned to using the human body as her primary subject. Juxtaposed against minimal yet heavily worked backgrounds, works like Blue Flash (2009-10) and The Master (2008), depict boldly colored fragments of the body that have been isolated, upturned and dispersed across the picture plane. Here, bodies become shapes, and Rothenberg once again demonstrates how the representation of the figure can be transformed into a study of space and form.

Susan Rothenberg was born in 1945 in Buffalo, New York and received a BFA at the Fine Arts School at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Rothenberg’s work is recognized internationally and has been shown in the United States and abroad. Early solos took place at Kunsthalle, Basel (1981-82), the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1982) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which traveled to seven institutions in the US and abroad (1983-85). A retrospective organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum, the Saint Louis Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Seattle Art Museum and the Dallas Museum of Art (1992-94). Other exhibitions include the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Monterrey, Mexico (1996-97) and “Susan Rothenberg: Paintings from the Nineties” at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1999). A survey, “Moving in Place,” was organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and traveled to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe and the Miami Art Museum (2009-11). Her work can be found in important public collections around the world, including Albright-Knox Art Gallery; Hirshhorn Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Stedelijk Museum; Tate, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum, New York, and Crystal Bridges, Bentonville, Arkansas.

Susan Rothenberg is represented by Sperone Westwater, New York, where she showed regularly from 1987 until her death in 2020.

This exhibition is accompanied by a new publication featuring texts by the artist and Peter Schjeldahl.

Hall Art Foundation
544 VT Route 106
Reading, VT 05062
United States
 

For more information and images, please contact the Foundation’s administrative office at info@hallartfoundation.org.