The Brooklyn Rail

Today, when big gestures are often the rule and superior connoisseurship can seem like a rarity, this hauntingly exquisite selection of Raquel Rabinovich’s work is a respite from the world’s chaos. Assembled to honor the first anniversary of her death, this exhibition jewel box contains a gem from each period of her practice, lovingly celebrated in essays in a memorial catalog. Her subtle works, many made over extended periods, require prolonged contemplation, causing the exhibition to feel like a meditation. Although culled from different decades of the artist’s production, they all inhabit infinite reaches of the timeline. Like the river sediments she often used, even her painted strokes feel like they were laid down at the dawn of creation.

Rabinovich’s work is timeless in the truest sense of the word: it resides in eternity encompassing past, present, and future. One of the exhibition’s most moving features is a dictionary projected on a gallery wall, which was written by Rabinovich in 2024. Creating this epithet in the final year of her life, she defines existence as a “Primordial state outside language.” Perhaps in preparation for her final journey, she defines threshold as a “Portal into an unknown realm,” and death as “The ultimate metaphor.”

Let’s begin with Dimension Five 1 (1970) and an essay by Alex Bacon describing how Jasper Johns, seeing the series from which this work came from at the Benson Gallery in 1970, initiated his lifelong friendship with Rabinovich. In Dimension Five 1, a suspended square acts as a mysterious portal. It is hard not to think of some of the transparent rectangles within rectangles found in the Light and Space works of Robert Irwin; Rabinovich has accomplished with paint what Irwin accomplished with scrims. In a large graphite and rubber-stamped drawing, Invisible Cities 6 (1984–85), we see another portal in the form of an arch. The charcoal post-and-lintel is like the “false doors” in Egyptian tombs—doors that allowed the Ka to pass into the afterlife. Rabinovich’s dictionary defines portal as a “Liminal space, gateless gate.” The liminal is the in-between realm, between waking and dream, life and death, mortal and divine—this is where her work resides.

Raquel Rabinovich had important friendships with poets and writers. Robert Kelly dedicated the poem “River Library with Footnotes” to her Mississippi River mud drawings. A beautiful watercolor on Indian paper, When Silence Becomes Poetry 3: for Robert Kelly (2015), is her return tribute. This small masterpiece is paired with When Silence Becomes Poetry 4: for George Quasha (2016), another tribute to a poet friend. These small watercolors have the same layered delicate touch of Mark Tobey, another master of the meditative stroke. In Argentina, Rabinovich formed a friendship with Jorge Luis Borges and asked him to make a poetic Spanish translation of “The Dark is Light Enough” for her series and exhibition. Here at Hutchinson Modern, we see two paintings from this 1963 series: La oscuridad tiene su luz 8 and La oscuridad tiene su luz 17. La oscuridad tiene su luz 17 is a key work, the first time the artist used the subtle squares which appear later. The Argentine writer and friend Luisa Valenzuela has also contributed to the catalog. Valenzuela describes a trip to visit Rabinovich shortly before her death when they both decided that the word “Forever” would be their mantra.

As someone who has been a long admirer of Raquel Rabinovich’s work, this exhibition presented new surprises. First, her dictionary Forests of Words (2024) is deeply moving. The dictionary’s drawings and definitions are pulled from the deepest wellsprings of the soul and present a remarkable portrait of the artist’s inner life. In works like It is Not Knowable (1998–2000), It is so Dark It Is Transparent (1998), Magic Squares 29 (2018), Gateless Gates 8 (1995–97), and Forest of Words 5 (2024) the subtle, barely visible, graphite grid gives the surface another dimension. Agnes Martin and others used graphite grids, but Rabinovich has incorporated many layers. In this way she joins Ad Reinhardt as an artist whose work requires both lengthy execution and observation. Dimensionality is perhaps the key word to describe Rabinovich’s work. Like Mark Tobey, her work is the product of a meditative practice and transports the viewer. This memorial exhibition reaffirms Raquel Rabinovich’s place in a pantheon of great artists who are our guides to realms we can only hope to visit. The exhibition is a sanctuary in a dark time and presents us with a portrait of an artist who chose the highest calling and path.