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Lot Essay
“…Rothenberg does what artists of exceptional caliber have always done: she takes a good look at the world and puts it together the way she wants, not the way it is. And it’s her reality that sticks in the mind.” (S. Whitfield, “The Roaming Eye”, exh. cat., Waddington Galleries, London, 2003).
Susan Rothenberg, along with others from her generation, emerged in the mid 1970s in a wave of bold new painting. This burgeoning international community of artists brought forward painterly expression, figuration, narrative and reference, which had been absent during over a decade of Minimalism and Conceptual Art.
Among her contemporaries, Rothenberg is recognized as being a virtuoso painter; her canvases are loaded with color, light, movement, active brushwork and personal meaning—her environment and personal experience remain primary influences. Pecos Pink, a prime example of her work painted in 1989-90, reflects much about her life at this time. It was included in her 1990 solo exhibition at Sperone Westwater in New York, the first exhibition of her work painted entirely in New Mexico.
Rothenberg had been commuting between New York and New Mexico in a cross country courtship with fellow artist Bruce Nauman, who already resided there. While they had known each over the years, it was a chance meeting at a dinner in the fall of 1988 that the dynamic changed and they married in February the following year. The warm reds and sienna of the wild and empty landscape of New Mexico found their way into her work, along with exuberant highly charged iconography. The bright pinks and oranges were a result of a gift from Nauman (the artist had gone to the local art supply store and bought multiple tubes of paint in every color to stock her temporary studio in Pecos).
Michael Auping, chief curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, describes Rothenberg’s painting as being unlike anything else being painted today. “The paintings bowled you over,” he recalls. “They were direct. They were muscular. They were like giant cave paintings, as if you were seeing figuration for the first time” (M. Auping, quoted by J. Belcove in “Interview: artist Susa Rothenberg, Financial Times, September 30, 2016 [accessed online]).
Susan Rothenberg, along with others from her generation, emerged in the mid 1970s in a wave of bold new painting. This burgeoning international community of artists brought forward painterly expression, figuration, narrative and reference, which had been absent during over a decade of Minimalism and Conceptual Art.
Among her contemporaries, Rothenberg is recognized as being a virtuoso painter; her canvases are loaded with color, light, movement, active brushwork and personal meaning—her environment and personal experience remain primary influences. Pecos Pink, a prime example of her work painted in 1989-90, reflects much about her life at this time. It was included in her 1990 solo exhibition at Sperone Westwater in New York, the first exhibition of her work painted entirely in New Mexico.
Rothenberg had been commuting between New York and New Mexico in a cross country courtship with fellow artist Bruce Nauman, who already resided there. While they had known each over the years, it was a chance meeting at a dinner in the fall of 1988 that the dynamic changed and they married in February the following year. The warm reds and sienna of the wild and empty landscape of New Mexico found their way into her work, along with exuberant highly charged iconography. The bright pinks and oranges were a result of a gift from Nauman (the artist had gone to the local art supply store and bought multiple tubes of paint in every color to stock her temporary studio in Pecos).
Michael Auping, chief curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, describes Rothenberg’s painting as being unlike anything else being painted today. “The paintings bowled you over,” he recalls. “They were direct. They were muscular. They were like giant cave paintings, as if you were seeing figuration for the first time” (M. Auping, quoted by J. Belcove in “Interview: artist Susa Rothenberg, Financial Times, September 30, 2016 [accessed online]).