SUSAN ROTHENBERG: PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS
Bucket of Water comes at the midpoint of Rothenberg’s career; this survey of her paintings and drawings from 1974 to 1992, organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, begins with the fairly large-scale horse paintings for which the artist is probably still best known. In a video accompanying the show, Rothenberg, who moved to New Mexico in 1990 after living and working in New York for 20 years, says that at first she considered the horse a neutral and quiet image to which she had no emotional attachment. It was simply a means to edge her way out of the minimalist aesthetic that dominated mainstream painting during the 1960s and ’70s. Yet what’s most interesting about her early horses–abstracted, featureless silhouettes always seen from the side–are their small but potent emotional moments; they are sometimes mysterious, sometimes even irrational, but rarely are they neutral.
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Rothenberg’s drawings from 1979 are among the best work in the exhibit as well, many of them as compelling and complete as the larger paintings. In an untitled drawing made with acrylic paint and flashe (a French vinyl-based color) the paper just barely contains the energy of three forward- facing galloping horses. The small scale of the central blue horse, crushed between its two larger companions, creates an intriguing ambiguity: while it might be farther back in space, it might also be a colt both constrained and supported by its parents. Throughout the exhibit curator Michael Auping has placed Rothenberg’s drawings alongside her paintings. Some, like this untitled piece, work well alone; others–small doodles that illustrate the genesis of Rothenberg’s ideas–hold less interest.
Here and there among the wrenching, occasionally heavy-handed images of distress in Rothenberg’s most recent paintings are a few tender moments. In the keyed-up Orange Break (1989-’90), whose field of warm cadmium reds harks back to the early horse paintings, two fragmented, twisted torsos fit together like hands in gloves: there’s something both silly and endearing about the way the ears of one figure tuck comfortably behind the knees of the other. And here, as elsewhere, Rothenberg’s color works against expectations: for this primarily sweet, lyrical piece she employs hot, violent colors, yet for more agitated subjects like the galloping/fragmented horse paintings of 1979, she uses cool, serene blue.
