Artist: Susan Rothenberg

Hauser & Wirth presents ‘The Weather,’ the gallery’s first exhibition dedicated to the work of celebrated artist Susan Rothenberg (1945 - 2020). ‘The Weather’ features 14 paintings—including canvases rarely and never before exhibited—that span the arc of the artist’s career. In addition to canonical masterpieces, the exhibition features works that Rothenberg both lived with and tucked away for decades. Together, these works offer an uncommonly intimate glimpse into the restless expanse of Rothenberg’s psyche— revealing, in turn, the raw emotional depth that defined her singular vision.

For more than five decades, Rothenberg developed a powerful language through painting that was guided by an intrinsic sense of formal rigor as well as her unerring intuition. From the ‘asteroidal impact’ of her radical breaking open of minimalist conventions to the spectral apparitions of her late paintings, Rothenberg continuously redefined the medium, placing her at the center of the global re-emergence of painting that began in the mid-1970s. Rothenberg encoded a fierce, sometimes cryptic language of resistance and alterity into her work, establishing herself as a model of artistic integrity and self-determination. In so doing, she developed an oeuvre which has served as an inspiration to generations of painters.

The exhibition highlights the poignant and personal facture of each of Rothenberg’s canvases––their haptic immediacy. Using vigorous brushwork, she whipped up a kind of atmospheric pressure in each canvas—what she often called ‘the weather’—from which her enigmatic figures emerged. From the outset, the bold contours of Rothenberg’s horses, which she set against agitated monochromatic backgrounds resembled glyphs, charged with a primordial force. Later bodies—both human and animal come under pressure, they fold, break apart, multiply and dissolve.

The critic Peter Schjeldahl once observed, ‘the paintings hit higher than the viscera. Their effect is both frenetic and icy, a frozen violence very much of the head—without being heady, because they are so firmly composed and cannily painted.’

From the ghost of her own palm prints at the margins of ‘Outline’ (1978) to the bold lines of ‘Red Head’ (1981)—a nod to the artist’s tools—Rothenberg’s literal and figurative touch is unmistakable throughout her work. The floating heads of ‘Las Blancas’ (1996 – 1997), painted after a near-death experience from a bee sting, show her adrift in the liminal space between consciousness and mortality, while the raucous entwined bodies of ‘All Night Long’ (2000 – 2001)—pulse with energy. And in ‘Untitled (Band and Hands Green)’ (c. 2018), painted towards the end of Rothenberg’s life, the grasping hands feel both urgent and elegiac. Here, as across the works on view, the essence of the artist, as a subject containing multitudes, radiates.