ALL HER PRETTY HORSES.

Byline: DOUGLAS FAIRFIELD

"Sometimes painting what you didn't see but think you might have seen because it will make a more interesting painting is what you do. It's cheating, but painting is all about cheating to create an exaggerated effect," says artist Susan Rothenberg in her new monograph, Susan Rothenberg: Moving in Place, published on the occasion of her oneperson exhibition by the same name. The show is on view at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and is scheduled to open at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum on Jan. 22, 2010.

"An exaggerated effect" is perfectly descriptive of Rothenberg's work, as are such modifiers as bold, expressive, direct, painterly, graphic, tactile, and, above all, enigmatic. In The Chase (1999), for example, there are nine dogs -- or at least three dogs that appear more than once -- pursuing a rabbit in a frantic free-for-all that abstractly creates a circle framed within the square boundaries of the painting. The geometry in Rothenberg's painting is formal but unstable, as there is the sense that cengal force -- both from the exaggerated canines and from the artist's brushstrokes -- may at any time break the circle, which is already misshapen. There is no true focal point, and at the center of the imagined vortex there is nothing but a palpable void, around which

the untethered dogs scurry.

Another work, With Martini (2002), displays three pairs of dismembered hands -- some with forearms attached -- situated around a table and engaged in a game of dominoes. The dominoes and a lone cigarette are the most concrete elements in the picture. The table doesn't exist, except as an ambiguous, loosely painted background that we imagine to be a support for the arms and hands, which are themselves insubstantial, drawn via simple, fractured contours and painted in a sketchlike manner. In Rothenberg's asymmetrical composition, a pair of bright red hands tips our attention to the left, opposite the less-conspicuous hand holding the martini glass on the right. The color scheme seems arbitrary and is not a pretty picture by any means. Yet the smell of cigarette smoke and the subtle sounds of shifting dominoes are almost tangible. About the painting, Rothenberg writes: "I like the fact that the hands aren't anchored. They just float around the space of the painting. You really have to know that they are at a table. The hands are just these living things, moving around like the dogs or the horses."

Less mystifying are Rothenberg's horse paintings from the 1970s, which established her reputation as a New Image painter -- a tenuous label given to a party of 10 painters featured in an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1978 called New Image Painting. The group included Nicholas Africano, Jennifer Bartlett, Denise Green, Michael Hurson, Neil Jenney, Lois Lane, Robert Moskowitz, David True, Joe Zucker, and Rothenberg. Although the artists were not associated as a group, what their work had in common was discernible objects posited in unrealistic contexts, which defied the lingering presence of Minimalism and the art world's love affair with performance and installation art. In short, painting was not dead, as it had once been pronounced by any number of gallerists, art historians, and art critics. "When I saw her early gallery exhibitions of horse paintings in the mid-1970s, I was knocked off my feet," said Michael Auping, chief curator for the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, curator of the Moving in Place exhibit, and essayist for the book.

Although the subjects of these paintings were recognizable as horses -- some standing, some running -- Rothenberg's work at the time was less about representationalism as it was about using a familiar object as a conduit to explore more formal concerns in painting: process and technique. Despite an aspect of narrative in her work, then and now, Rothenberg's art persists in addressing the subject of painting as an act of self-expression.

Rothenberg relies on drawing, on paper and directly onto the canvas, to get her concepts moving. "The first horses generally involved some drawing on the canvas with pencil; first with pencil, then with paint, and then the form," she said in a 2007 interview with Auping, who has known the artist for 30 years. Her initial ideas, however, are conceived on any available scrap of paper, from the backs of business envelopes to yellow legal pads. "Rather than getting a sheet of paper and putting it on the wall and developing a drawing, I'd just sit in my chair and say, 'What if it was like this?' Little doodles, and on and on," she said. "It seemed like a lot of work to get a piece of paper, staple it to the wall, and make a drawing."

Conceptually more challenging than Rothenberg's horse imagery are Red, The Master, and Tilt, paintings done in 2008 that depict hands and arms dangling from strings like the detached appendages of marionettes. "I first thought of these as puppets, but then I got a little darker and thought about prosthetics," Rothenberg says in the book. "I'm not sure what to make of them. I've never felt comfortable painting a complete figure. I guess I still don't." But what makes these images unsettling, rather than playful, is that the body parts are suspended in the air like helium balloons; and compositionally, the images are top-heavy, conveying a feeling of spatial disorientation.

Whether we interpret Rothenberg's imagery to our satisfaction -- whether or not we truly "get it" -- may be unimportant, as the artist can't always figure it out herself. In Auping's essay, she reflects on the 2008 body-part paintings: "I don't know exactly what they are, or how, or if they relate to any of my other work. I'm not sure how I ended up here." Despite Rothenberg's inability to explain the origins of some of her imagery, her work is difficult to ignore. "In every painting, Susan makes us look hard and wonder about what she is depicting and how she is reconstructing a narrative or memory," Auping said. "The key thing is that in that process, we're always rewarded with incredibly rich paint handling. For me, every brushstroke in a Rothenberg painting makes me look closer."

Nevertheless, it is interesting to see just how personal Rothenberg's images can be. From the titles alone, one gets a sense of the artist's immediate environment: Yellow Studio, Dominoes Squared, Dogs Killing Rabbit, and Chinese Goat. "For a while we had a goat, and it didn't get along very well with the dogs," the artist recalls in the monograph. "It was an unemasculated male goat. It would get fired up and start jumping everywhere -- on the dogs, on people,

on the car. And it would kick people. It was wild."

Born in Buffalo, New York, Rothenberg graduated from Cornell University with a bachelor of fine arts degree and secured a studio space in New York City in 1969. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship in 1979 and the Skowhegan Medal for Painting in 1998, as well as the Rolf Schock Prize in Visual Arts in 2003 (named after the late philosopher/artist and awarded every two years by the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts). Moving in Place is Rothenberg's second major monograph; the first, Susan Rothenberg by Joan Simon, was published by Abrams in 1991. In 1990, Rothenberg moved from New York to Galisteo, New Mexico, with her husband, artist Bruce Nauman, where they live and maintain separate studios.

Although Rothenberg's work is difficult to categorize, former Time critic Robert Hughes described it -- and the artist -- aptly in 1991, in the revised edition of The Shock of the New. "Rothenberg came out of Minimal art into figuration in the mid-'70s with, of all things, pictures of horses: equine silhouettes, emblematic not descriptive, embedded in flat space. Their 'primitive' look was,

in fact, quotation; it was clear from her knowing sense of close-valued color and her pasty, elegantly manipulated pigment that

she was already an artist of considerable sophistication."

Nearly 20 years later, Rothenberg's work continues to elude categorization; it does not fit neatly into any historical context. But it deserves to be recognized as part and parcel of the transition from Minimalism to Pop art in an era of artistic pluralism. And that spirit of individualism, of moving in place -- her place --

via abstraction and figuration, continues within the confines of

a studio in Galisteo. <