Artist Susan Rothenberg, Who Painted Free-Roaming Horses in Defiance of Her Era’s Prohibition on Figurative Art, Has Died at 75

Artist Susan Rothenberg, known
for her fearless embrace of figurative painting during a reign of
abstraction, has died at the age of 75. Her passing was confirmed
by her gallery, Sperone Westwater in New York.

“Since 1987, I have been privileged to show Susan Rothenberg’s
work and to experience close-up her passion for and commitment to
making art,” gallery cofounder Angela Westwater said in a
statement. “As a pioneer, she extended the boundaries of
painting—especially for other women artists.”

Rothenberg was born in 1945, in Buffalo, New York, and graduated
from Cornell University in Ithaca. She later studied at the
Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC, but dropped out after two
weeks and moved to New York in 1969. Her big breakthrough came in
1973, with a simple sketch of a horse.

“I had been doing abstract paintings, using a central dividing
line so as to keep the painting on the surface and call attention
to the canvas,” Rothenberg told New
York magazine in 1976. “The horse was just something
that happened on both sides of my line. The image held the space
and the line kept the picture flat.”

Two years later, she had her first solo exhibition
at 112 Greene Street, an alternative art space, in New York.
Along with artists including Jennifer Bartlett, Neil Jenney, and
Denise Green, Rothenberg became part of a group known as the New
Image artists, helping spark a resurgence in figurative
painting.

Her work, New York
Times journalist Grace Glueck declared in 1984, “was
immediately seen as an important departure from the austerely
reductive painting of the time, later fixing her as a key figure in
the transition from the Minimal to the Expressionist
generation.”

President Barack Obama had a work by Rothenberg on view in the
White House, and was a personal collector of her art, according to
Sperone Westwater.

Although Rothenberg remains best-known for her horse pictures,
the horse motif ceased to be a dominant aspect of her work after
1980.

Rothenberg represented the US at the 1980 Venice Biennale, and
was also included in the 2007 edition of the show, as well as
in Documenta 9 in 1992. A traveling museum survey of her work
opened at the Museum of Modern Art Fort Worth in Texas in
2009.

Other key moments in Rothenberg’s career included her inclusion
in group shows such as “New Image Painting” at the Whitney Museum
of American Art in 1978 and “Zeitgeist” at the Martin-Gropius-Bau
in Berlin in 1982. In Berlin, she was the sole woman among 45
artists.

The artist’s first marriage, to Canadian sculptor George Trakas,
ended in divorce in 1979. Their daughter, Maggie, was born in 1972.
Rothenberg married artist Bruce Nauman in 1989, and the two moved
to New Mexico the following year. Her later work was inspired by
the desert landscape and its animals.

Among the institutions that collected Rothenberg’s work are the
Albright-Knox Art Gallery in her native Buffalo; the Hirshhorn
Museum and Sculpture Garden, in Washington, DC; the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New
York.

The post Artist Susan Rothenberg, Who Painted Free-Roaming
Horses in Defiance of Her Era’s Prohibition on Figurative Art, Has
Died at 75 appeared first on artnet News.