Susan Rothenberg

Susan Rothenberg

Susan Rothenberg was born in 1945 in Buffalo, New York. After studying a Cornell University, she briefly enrolled at the Corcoran School of art in Washington. She then moved to New York where she studied dance with Deborah Hay and Joan Jonas. While in New York she studied art by visiting as many art galleries as she could. She was drawn to art works that showed simple objects that had been made extraordinary and that seemed to resonate with the artist’s emotions.
In the 1970s she began to paint large, figurative paintings depicting horses for she became renowned. It is said that what started her work with horses was simply a ‘doodle’ of a horse. The images are glyph-like and iconic,
“…these images are not so much abstracted as paired down to their most essential elements.” (Miller, W., 2010)
Instead of being firmly grounded they seemed to float in space.
"When I stumbled on the horse idea, I went, 'Okay, this can be my Jasper John flag, my target. This can be nothing to me because I don’t like horses. I can draw a line through it and make it flat.' I could take all the things that I’d learned and negate painting as much as possible in terms of illusionism and shadow and composition and stuff."
- Susan Rothenberg
"I guess I made my reputation on [the horse idea] because they were acceptable as paintings and acceptable as not going backwards. They were acceptable as objects in some way."
- Susan Rothenberg
Along with the horses she would paint parts of the body, which were detached.   With the addition of these body parts, which are said to be ‘autobiographical in origin’ (Grove Art), she examined and expressed an interest in the unconscious process. These were all painted like totems or symbols, and,
“…served as formal elements through which Rothenberg investigated the meaning, mechanics, and essence of painting.” (Miller, W., 2010)

She had her first solo exhibition in New York at the Greene Street Gallery, in 1975. At that...