Susan Rothenberg

Susan Rothenberg was a painter who was born in Buffalo, New York. She has been internationally celebrated throughout her career and heavily sought out since her first solo exhibition in New York City in 1975. After she graduated from college and moved to New York in 1969, Rothenberg continued to paint in the abstract style she was most familiar with. After one or two years of this, the artist grew bored and updated her style to a figurative one. This figurative style was the perfect feminine opposition to the hugely popular and influential abstract expressionist and minimalist styles that had prevailed into the 1970s. Her figure of choice at the time was the horse.  Often asked why she chose the horse to represent, the artist would respond with the simple answer that she found herself doodling horses and decided to take that to canvas. Over the years, critics have not been happy with this answer and focused on the horse as the artist’s symbol of herself; her physical embodiment in paint. Rothenberg, however, never indulged this theory. Since that time, Rothenberg has broadened her sights to other figures such as the human, yet still relied on some of the techniques learned from the abstract expressionist school that she grew up around.

Rothenberg was born in Buffalo in 1945 and received her BFA from Cornell University. She has exhibited all over the world at institutions such as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Los Angeles  County Museum of Art and The Phillips Collection. Rothenberg lived and worked in New Mexico with her husband, the celebrated sculptor Bruce Nauman.