Susan Rothenberg, early 1980s. Photo: Helaine Messer
Book Launch & Talk: ‘Susan Rothenberg: The Weather’ with Lynne Tillman & Alexis Lowry
On the occasion of the closing weekend of ‘Susan Rothenberg. The Weather’ at Hauser & Wirth 22nd Street and celebrating the release of the exhibition catalogue from Hauser & Wirth Publishers, please join us for an afternoon conversation with writer Lynne Tillman and Curatorial Senior Director Alexis Lowry.
‘Susan Rothenberg. The Weather’ presents 14 paintings—including canvases rarely and never before exhibited—that span the arc of the artist’s career. In addition to canonical masterpieces, the exhibition features works that Rothenberg both lived with and tucked away for decades. Together, these works offer an uncommonly intimate glimpse into the restless expanse of Rothenberg’s psyche— revealing, in turn, the raw emotional depth that defined her singular vision.
The new publication 'Susan Rothenberg: The Weather’ offers a holistic representation of Rothenberg’s work, tracing her career from the monumental horse paintings that brought her to prominence in the 1970s, to the fragmented limbs and figures in motion that defined her production in the 1980s, through to the natural drama of New Mexico’s desert landscape which infused her work throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s. Introduced by Alexis Lowry, brilliant reproductions and striking details of Rothenberg’s paintings are paired with thought-provoking responses by writers, artists, and thinkers including curator Shanay Jhaveri, artist Joan Jonas, and critic Lynne Tillman, while a meticulously researched biography provides insight into Rothenberg’s remarkable life.
This event is free; however, reservations are required.
About Susan Rothenberg
Susan Charna Rothenberg was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1945. She received her BFA from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 1967, having studied painting and sculpture. During and after college, Rothenberg traveled to Greece and Spain, respectively, briefly attending the Corcoran School of Art, then moving in 1969 to New York City, where she lived for the next twenty years.
Despite the wide critical acclaim accorded to her oeuvre, Rothenberg’s art was the subject of only two major survey exhibitions during her lifetime. In 1992 the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, a museum Rothenberg had visited growing up in Buffalo, presented ‘Susan Rothenberg: Paintings and Drawings,’ featuring over 80 works that explored the relationship of drawing to the artist’s paintings going back to the beginning of her career. In 2009, Michael Auping organized ‘Susan Rothenberg: Moving in Place’ at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. That exhibition’s aim was to look back upon the development of the artist’s career from a more holistic and formal standpoint, identifying her distinctive approach to organizing pictorial space regardless of subject matter, reaching well beyond her early, more well-known horse paintings.
Rothenberg’s work is held in many important public and private collections, including at the Albright-Knox ArtGallery, Buffalo, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, D.C.; CrystalBridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK; The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Museum of FineArts, Boston, MA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; National Galleryof Art, Washington, D.C.; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, DK; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam;Tate, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, among others.
About Lynne Tillman
Lynne Tillman's novels include Haunted Houses; No Lease on Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction; American Genius, A Comedy, and Men and Apparitions, nominated for a Republic of Consciousness Prize (UK, 2021). Her short fiction books include SOMEDAY THIS WILL BE FUNNY and THIS IS NOT IT; nonfiction books include The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965–67, with photographs by Stephen Shore and What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Tillman has received a Guggenheim Fellowship; a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and was awarded the Katherine Anne Porter Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In March 2025, Soft Skull Press will publish her selected stories, Thrilled to Death; in 2026, Zwirner Press will publish a collection of Tillman’s essays on art and culture.
