Nearly twenty years after her last solo exhibition in London, Thomas Dane Gallery showcases 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.
Since she rose to prominence in New York in the mid-seventies with her now-iconic paintings of horses, Rothenberg has held a special place in her peers’ hearts and souls, referred to often as a ‘painter’s painter’. Throughout a career spanning five decades, her work has remained uncompromising and original, and often touched upon the metaphysical and contemplative.
Blue Frontal (1978) is a striking and majestic example of her horse paintings, which the art critic Peter Schjeldahl so vividly remembers seeing for the first time in 1975 at 112 Greene Street, an alternative artist-run exhibition space in Soho, New York. It was an exhibition, he felt, that altered the course of art history: ‘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, in which carefulness had displaced suggestions of anything worth caring about. The works conveyed anger, exaltation, and self-abandoning intrepidity. They felt personal […].’[1]
The inimitable style and palette and unapologetic and muted figuration characterising these early works would endure throughout Rothenberg’s later output. Her career was also entwined with some of the most important and influential painting exhibitions of the time, such as ‘New Image Painting’ at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, in 1979, which posed a refreshing alternative to the abstraction and minimalist tendencies of the time, as well as ‘Zeitgeist’ at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, in 1982, in which Rothenberg was the only female participant out of 45 artists. Such was the effect of these shows, against the tide of non-representational art of the times, that it helped reassert the motif and the emotive in the painting discourse.
Running concurrently with Susan Rothenberg will be Glenn Ligon: An Open Letter at Thomas Dane Gallery, London, 11 Duke Street St. James’s (4 February – 2 April 2022).
| Duration | 04 February 2022 - 09 April 2022 |
| Times | Tuesday to Friday 11am-6pm Saturday 12-6pm |
| Cost | Free |
| Venue | Thomas Dane Gallery |
| Address | 3 & 11 Duke Street St James's, London, SW1Y 6BN |
| Contact | / info@thomasdane.com / www.thomasdane.com |