Face, 2001

Susan Rothenberg was born in New York and received a BFA from Cornell University, and studied at George Washington University and the Corcoran Museum School. Since the mid-1970s, she has received wide-spread recognition for her innovation and independence among artists of the contemporary period. Although known as an expressionist painter, she also did printmaking and drawing. Creating life-sized, figurative paintings of horses-referred to as "glyph-like and iconic" and taken down to their basic elements--earned her early recognition. A 1975 acrylic painting, Four Color Horse, shows a profile of a horse on a "plane of converging red, yellow, black, and white triangles". In 1978, Susan Rothenberg and other artists showing at the New Image Painting exhibition refused to be lumped together as a movement. She said they were individual artists who were "reintroducing images" and felt it odd to be brought together as a group and labeled. Early on, Susan Rothenberg was compared to Georgia O'Keefe--they both became well-know in New York, moved to New Mexico to paint, and each became a recluse there. However, Rothenberg said she never connected to O'Keefe's style or subject matter. The 1980s reflected her work on fragmented human body parts, which appeared to be totem-like and primitive. After moving to New Mexico in 1990, Susan Rothenberg’s paintings began to reflect the change in environment. She started using oils and developed a new interest in using life-event memories--such as a riding accident or walking the dog--as subject matter for her paintings. She explored color and light and how she transferred her personal experiences onto canvas. She developed a distinctive feature in her work called "tilted perspective", common in desert landscapes, where the view-point is located above the ground which gives the individual an "eerie psychological perspective". Throughout her career, Susan Rothenberg retained her style and expressionism, reflecting abstract painting traits that have been around for a century. Her fondness of Abstract-Expressionists like Philip Guston and Jackson Pollock are evident in her work. Besides her first solo exhibition of 'three large-scale paintings of horses' (1975), she held exhibitions across the U.S. and abroad. A major survey, initiated by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie Institute, and the Tate Gallery, London, among other institutions (1983–1985). She received a Creative Artists Public Service grant (1976) from New York State, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant (1979), and the Guggenheim Fellowship (1980).