The Brooklyn Rail

In a 2005 Art21 documentary, Susan Rothenberg is filmed traversing the land surrounding the ranch she shares with her husband, Bruce Nauman, near Galisteo, New Mexico. She explains that these walks are part of her daily ritual, and that she often pays attention to the ground beneath her to see if she can find an arrowhead or two fragments of the same pot. One such discovery is subsequently captured; Rothenberg crouches down and uncovers a few loose shards of ceramic, which she attributes to an eleventh or twelfth century pot. After sliding these relics together, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the artist dusts off her hands and continues her walk.

Three decades prior, in New York City, Rothenberg revealed her now-iconic horse paintings for the first time at 112 Greene Street. Upon viewing the monumental compositions, critic Peter Schjeldahl recalled the “kinetic force” of the works, which left him “dumbstruck.” This reaction has little to do with the flattened renderings of the rather commonplace animal. Rather, it is a response to the fact that Rothenberg painted figures in an age when painting and figuration were deemed dead. In 1975, Rothenberg was already demonstrating her tendency to uncover both lost and new ideas—those of figuration, Expressionism, even Minimalism—and piece them together in newly unified forms.

Hauser & Wirth’s Susan Rothenberg exhibition The Weather features fourteen paintings that illustrate Rothenberg’s extraordinary ability to discern and renegotiate disparate fragments in a resolved whole. Upon entering the gallery’s prodigious space—well-suited for the artist’s preferred large scale—viewers are immediately confronted with Dos Equis (1974). Here, we see Rothenberg’s now iconic horses—two, to be exact—stenciled out of feverous strokes of dirtied pigment on an off-white canvas, and bifurcated, as the title suggests, by two Xs. But curator Alexis Lowry refuses to limit Rothenberg to the shape of the steed. By hanging the horses alongside two renderings of a woman on all fours, Mary I and Mary II, created during the same year, Lowry suggests that the horse, in all its glory, is only a mere tool in Rothenberg’s quest to renegotiate the figure’s importance within the formal conventions of artmaking in the late twentieth century. As the artist explained: “The horse was just something that happened on both sides of my line.”

The stallion only reappears in The Weather in ambiguous fragments. Outline (1978–79), for example, features a floating horse head, rigid and black in comparison to “the weather” of the background (Rothenberg’s chosen term in describing her built up surfaces of frenetic strokes of paint, and the inspiration behind the exhibition’s title). Yet, as Outline’s (1978–79) worked-up surface indicates—and as the multiple years dating the painting further emphasize—the composition presents a more nuanced narrative than its immediate simplicity may suggest. Rothenberg’s now-dismantled horse seeks new meaning within a blank void. The artist’s own handprints, impressed in the composition’s edges, directly implicate her with this story. At a crossroads, having deemed her retirement from the full-bodied horse for which she gained her fame, Rothenberg authored the next chapter. The loose parts stand in for the whole.

Across from Outline, Red Head (1980–81) makes the leap from horse to human. Rather than a disembodied animal head, we see that of a person layered beneath the outline of a fist. That this disorienting, even unsettling painting hung within Rothenberg’s living room, tucked away from the public for years, feels of the utmost significance. Inhabiting her personal space, the largescale work can be interpreted as an emblem of the artist’s ongoing preoccupations: not just the infinite possibilities of figuration, but, also, the innermost thoughts and concerns that one simple equation—paint + canvas—can unleash from the psyche of both maker and viewer.

A relentless drive to illustrate humanity through weathered surfaces is at the crux of Hauser & Wirth’s exhibition. This preoccupation becomes increasingly obvious as one encounters the echoed form of an erect figure in Our Lord (1979), ghostly heads floating across Las Blancas’s (1996–97) muddied canvas, fleshy forms tangled within an anthropomorphic explosion in All Night Long (2000–01), and jet-green hands urgently gripping an unidentified orb in the most recent work Untitled (Band and Hands Green) (ca. 2018). Whether monochrome or vibrant, utilizing acrylic or oil paint, completed amidst the frenzy of Manhattan or the serenity of New Mexico, within each canvas we gain a clearer picture of Rothenberg: an artist on a walk, alert to the path in front of her, looking to unearth and unite buried or overlooked aspects of herself and humankind.

It would be easy to miss Rest (1981), the smallest work on display, amidst the fraught emotions reverberating from its largescale company. But this piece is crucial. Within the small canvas, an electric-blue figure reclines alongside its shadow. Two versions exist of the same being that are all at once unified, fractured, and untethered to a recognizable context or landscape. And yet, unlike the other renderings of evocative figures and their fragments, there is a feeling of deep solitude conveyed in Rest. Here, multiple facets of self and dual states of existence are placed together and granted permission to simply exist, without clear takeaway. The artist leaves this composition, too, in her wake, awaiting discovery by the next alert passerby.