Earlier than her loss of life in 2020, Susan Rothenberg stated that she had not anticipated to obtain “loads of applause,” in the course of the post-Minimal motion for her formally explorative, psychologically nuanced paintings, maybe given its material: massive horses and, later, disembodied heads, limbs, and uncanny vistas. “They get you or they don’t,” she added.
Hauser & Wirth, a mega-gallery that spans three continents, has introduced its illustration of the Susan Rothenberg property, alongside a promise to make the world “get” her progressive strategy to abstraction. The artist will characteristic in Hauser & Wirth’s Artwork Basel presentation (June 17-22) adopted by her first exhibition with the gallery, opening September 4 in New York. (From 1987 till her loss of life, Rothenberg was represented by Sperone Westwater gallery, and the gallery then represented her property.)
“She just isn’t on the place in historical past the place we really feel she belongs,” Hauser & Wirth president Marc Payot instructed ARTnews. “Once you consider her developing within the Seventies, when portray was not in style and conceptual artwork was dominant—she, as a lady, doing what she was doing, was extremely radical.” It will be significant, he stated, that the gallery undo a few notions about Rothenberg: that she was primarily a painter of horses, and that her apply was restricted to portray.
Rothenberg additionally made drawings, and had a symbolic vocabulary collected from her experiences in New York, the place she had her first exhibition in 1975—of, sure, three monumental galloping horses—and eventual relocation to New Mexico to be along with her husband, the artist Bruce Nauman. Her work offered folks and animals of their joyful, if uncanny, entirety; or fragmented its topics into, as an illustration, fingers, hooves, and tongues. She refused to affix group exhibits the place she could be the one lady, simply as her aesthetic rebuked easy classification. Parts of Shade Subject, Minimalism, and experimental dance mingled in her apply. (Amongst her associates was Joan Jonas, who she carried out with once they had been each college students.)
Thus far, horse work have dominated her market, a minimum of at public sale. The 2 highest costs at public sale for Rothenberg’s work had been set for work of horses. Final fall, her 1976 portray United States II offered for $1.99 million at Christie’s, New York. It was a giant soar from her earlier document of $490,000, set in 2007, additionally at Christies. However a minimum of one market observer has identified that the work goes means past horses. In a 2022 Artnet Information piece about undervalued feminine artists born between 1930 and 1975, artwork advisor Ivy Shapiro instructed reporter Katya Kazakina, “Susan Rothenberg’s horses get fairly a price out there, however the work extends means past that.”
Rothenberg’s work is held in important personal and institutional collections worldwide, together with the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, the Whitney Museum, the Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, and the Tate in London. Regardless of the important acclaim Rothenberg’s oeuvre earned her, together with a Guggenheim fellowship, she has been the topic of solely two main surveys throughout her lifetime: in 1992, on the Albright-Knox Artwork Gallery, a museum she frequented rising up in Buffalo, New York, and in 2009, on the Fashionable Artwork Museum of Fort Value.
Hauser & Wirth, Payot stated, goals to deepen her legacy; he identified that Louise Bourgeois and Philip Guston, two artists with estates represented by the gallery, may, for instance, present poignant comparisons. Bourgeois, Payot added, resonated with Rothenberg’s introverted however “very wealthy psychological cosmos,” whereas Guston appeared to share her spirit: “No matter whether or not she or he was known as, on the time, a ‘painter’s painter,’ whatever the important response, they each did what they wanted to do, and for his or her complete lives.”
