Word: rothenberger
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Since the early '80s, Rothenberg has been grappling with two problems: how to put her fragments together, and how to do it in terms of color. She has never been a "natural" colorist (black, white, duns and a range of silvery grays, punctuated with the occasional splotch of crimson or ultramarine blue, came easiest to this tonal painter), and quite often her efforts to introject color into her work looked like mere tints imposed on a monochrome structure...
From about 1980 onward Rothenberg took more to an open weaving with the brush, dabbing her pigment into a field of hatchings. There is so much overpainting and layering in her recent work that the paintings seem to have grown excruciatingly slowly. They carry a patina of doubt on every square inch of their surface. But they do breathe: light and air -- of a rather claustral kind, but atmosphere just the same -- bathe the bodies and unify them as objects in the world while threatening always to dissolve them as emblems of personality. The surfaces look as if they came...
...subjects of this show are mostly dancers and jugglers, manipulators of the fleeting instant in whose work Rothenberg detects a familiar cultural pathos, distantly related to Picasso's circus folks but less sentimental. Most of them are in rapid movement, spinning, doing plies and tossing eggs, and this contrasts oddly with the way they are painted. True, Rothenberg always liked to play on contradictions between the quick, snapshot nature of her chosen image (a galloping horse, a teetering bicyclist, Mondrian solemnly turning like a mantis on the dance floor) and the nuanced and obviously slow way it was presented...
...this point it is clear how much, subliminally or not, Giacometti has meant to Rothenberg. This probing for form through a web, a mist of approximate lines, so that the never-quite-final shape becomes a palimpsest of recorded attempts to fix it, echoes Giacometti's own anxiety before his subjects. How can the artist be sure, and make you sure, what is there? For Rothenberg the problem becomes worse, because she chooses subjects in movement, the opposite of Giacometti's hieratic stillness. It does not always come off, but when it does you are made sharply aware...
...resigned cousin of the figure in Munch's Scream; for no clear reason the lower half of the body is left standing up behind it, like a pair of empty waders, in the bland spectral light of what appears to be an indoor swimming pool. At such moments Rothenberg's imagery delivers the jolt and reach of feeling one associates with the poetry of Sylvia Plath. She is unquestionably one of the signal artists of our confused time...