Anne Rothenstein’s paintings and collages have a dreamlike quality, an impenetrable otherness. Her figures, landscapes and intimate interiors are alienated from the viewer by an invisible veil.
Born into the third generation of one of the eminent dynasties of British art and raised in an artists’ community near Great Bardfield in Essex, yet by her own account largely self-taught, she has been painting full time since the early 1980s and has shown every two to three years since, including at the Royal Academy. She made her debut on the New York art scene in May with a solo show at Stephen Friedman Gallery. Now Charleston Farmhouse, the museum and modernist gallery that was the rural Sussex retreat of the Bloomsbury group is putting on her first UK solo institutional exhibition, running until October 13.
It’s a mesmerising exhibition enveloped in a mise-en-scene of red walls, which provide a womb-like setting to absorb and reflect on the endless stories that emerge from the paintings.
Rothenstein likes to paint in oils directly on ungessoed wood, building up delicately layered washes and integrating the wood grain into the picture plane. The distinctive tonal breadth of her palette, deep rich dark burgundy reds, dense blues and strange shades of green, is given an added dimension by the texture of the wood, which adds to the denseness and layering of her work.
Though she describes herself as artistically self-educated – she dropped out of her foundation course at Camberwell Arts College in the 1960s to try her hand at writing and acting – her work is a long way from artistic naivety. Her enigmatic figures and interiors have a kinship with those of Vilhelm Hammershoi, Gwen John and Edouard Vuillard. In the Japanese flatness of her composition and colouring, there are Fauvist and Nabi echoes. When your grandfather is Sir William Rothenstein R.A., your father is the painter and printmaker Michael Rothenstein R.A., your mother is the portraitist Duffy Ayers, and your uncles include a director of the Tate, you may be well placed to absorb creative influences by osmosis.
Rothenstein’s paintings depict expansive landscapes and intimate interiors drawn from memory, personal experiences, and found material from newspapers and magazines. Androgynous figures and melancholic landscapes blur the lines of identity and narrative, inviting observers to immerse themselves in unresolved ambiguities.
Like carefully arranged clues in a detective story, the subjects and objects in her paintings draw the viewer into a hidden drama. ‘The Red Kitchen’ 2024 juxtaposes a placemat with a vase of skeletal flowers, a jug, a glass, a patterned scarf: a cryptic puzzle without a key. In ‘Remains of the Wedding Breakfast’, the scattered and abandoned leftovers of a celebration suggest a doom-filled foreboding about marriage
– maybe.
Sometimes, the starting point for a painting is a particular current event, an advertisement, or a film which sparks off a narrative, the ending of which, however, is never clear or defined. ‘Unknown Territory,” 2022, for example, was inspired, she says, by a newspaper photograph of a Ukrainian train arriving at a Polish station, where local women had left pushchairs on the platform for children fleeing the war. “As with so many of my paintings the image changed completely. The train disappeared under the landscape, the refugees emerged and began what seemed to me an endless wandering’, Rothenstein says in an accompanying text.
Rothenstein says her work is entirely intuitive. “My reasons and intentions when making a particular painting are quite mysterious to me,” she says. Something may light a spark, but sometimes, even after the painting is finished, she isn’t sure where it came from. “Sometimes I may never find out.”
Unlike a detective story, the clues do not lead to a resolution: ‘My paintings are as mysterious to me as they are to you,” Rothenstein says: “That’s what’s exciting and keeps me thinking. I wonder what I’ll find out next.”
Anne Rothenstein, Charleston in Firle, East Sussex BN8 6LL1 May – 13 October 2024
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Words and photos Claudia Barbieri ©Artlyst 2024