Susan Rothenberg

Susan Rothenberg is known for her expressive paintings of the landscape and animals of the American West, particularly wild horses. Rothenberg attended Cornell University and after graduation spent much of her early career in New York. In 1990 she moved to New Mexico, where she lives with her husband, the artist Bruce Nauman, and drew inspiration from the surrounding environment. 

Rothenberg has consistently avoided following the main trends of contemporary art, though her work has been widely influential since the 1970s. She began her career as one of the so-called “new imagist” painters of the mid-1970s, working to find a new space between abstraction and representation. Her inclusion of representational figures is typically so spare and iconic, and concerned with light, color, and surface, that it has been favorably described as being closer to Minimalism than realism. Works such as her 1975 acrylic and flashe painting, Four Color Horse, subtly depict the profile of a horse inscribed on a plane of converging red, yellow, black, and white triangles. Other works, like a 1987 swirling, untitled charcoal, oil, and graphite drawing are far more emotive and abstract, while works like her 2011 Ring Necks, Covering, are more explicitly pictorial.

Rothenberg was the recipient of a 1979 NEA Fellowship Grant and the 1998 Skowhegan Medal for Painting. She has had numerous museum retrospectives, including shows at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and her work can be found in public collections around the world.