Grounded in the World: Remembering Susan Rothenberg (1945–2020)

The Walker Art Center mourns the loss of artist Susan Rothenberg, who passed away early this week at the age of 75. Rothenberg’s enduring works showed her persistent interest in the figure, even when such a practice was deemed out of fashion in the art world.

Rothenberg is most famous for her paintings and works on paper, first gaining recognition for a series of approximately 40 canvases featuring the subject of the horse that she made in the 1970s. Critics hailed these works as a return to expression after years in which minimalism and conceptualism had become dominant aesthetic modes for artists. Hovering between gesture and restraint, figuration and abstraction, Rothenberg’s work heralded a new direction for painting, and critics at the time applauded Rothenberg for refusing to choose between otherwise typical categories. Reflecting on her work from this time period, she later recounted that part of her fascination with reintroducing figures into abstract painting was a need to ground her work in a physical reality. She chose the horse, an animal steeped in symbolism and mythology, as a starting point. Rothenberg quickly moved away from this particular form, but the desire to ground her practice in the world remained a key component of her art throughout her career. She drew from a myriad of images, including disembodied heads and hands, which she explored through a range of media, including sculpture, drawings, and prints.

Rothenberg was born in 1945 in Buffalo, New York. Her father encouraged her to become an artist, and she often explored the Albright-Knox Art Gallery as a child. She graduated from Cornell University in 1967 and enrolled at the Corcoran School of Art before leaving after only a few weeks. In an oft-recounted story, Rothenberg made her way to New York, where she began her practice in earnest. There she met her first husband, sculptor George Trakas. After two decades in New York, seeing considerable critical success as one of a group of artists known under the name “New Image” painters, Rothenberg moved to a 750-acre ranch in Galisteo, New Mexico, together with her second husband, Bruce Nauman. Working in this new environment, her art took on a more expressive and playful quality. Visually, this involved unexpected perspectival shifts which explored the relationships between sound, motion, and vision. The change in scenery also introduced an even wider range of colors and subject matter, including animals she lived with on the ranch. While art market trends that favored or disfavored her work have come and gone, Rothenberg persisted in her own unique approach to painting, which always found a receptive and welcoming audience among critics and museum-goers alike.

Her relationship to the Walker Art Center began early in her career. In May 1978, the Walker presented one of her first museum solo exhibitions, Viewpoints: Susan Rothenberg. The show consisted primarily of her then newly finished horse paintings, shown together in a single gallery, which afforded visitors the opportunity to see them in their various sizes, shades, and tones. The experience would have been a rare study of the medium of painting, its relation to optics, and exploration of where formal abstraction ends and representation begins. Since then, the Walker has collected several major pieces by the artist. Over decades since that early show in the Walker galleries, Rothenberg’s work has been collected widely and exhibited throughout the world in major museums and at such international venues as the Venice Biennale.

Walker exhibition technician Kirk McCall had the joy of meeting and befriending Rothenberg and Nauman while touring with the 1994 Walker-co-organized retrospective Bruce Nauman. “We had a fondness for getting lost and ditching the curators whenever possible to wander through bookstores and flea markets—El Rastro in Madrid being our favorite,” he recalls. “Susan was always so welcoming, warm, and sweet to me, always demanding I be with them at every event and dinner and seated at the head table.” They bonded over a diverse range of topics: “junk shops, light and space, patience, plants, puzzles, and corn on the cob.” After visiting their ranch for a few weeks, McCall described some of Rothenberg’s interests, including wandering the mesa searching for Anasazi pottery fragments, which the artist would reassemble in her studio, and the restorative yet challenging labor of running a small ranch. He speaks for all of us here at the Walker when he expresses that she will be dearly missed. The Walker is honored and proud to uphold her legacy through her work in the collection.