Lot Essay
Dorothea Rockburne was born in Canada and trained at Black Mountain College. Like Brice Marden, she worked as a studio assistant for Robert Rauschenberg. Her work, however, was very different from Rauschenberg's, and was much closer to that of artists from her own generation like Mel Bochner, Robert Smithson and Dan Graham. She shared their concern with extending the horizon of the minimalist debate and sought means to draw ideas, materials and objects into interlocking relationships. The subject matter and content of her work tended towards the conceptual, and like Bochner, she used mathematical concepts as the basis for her investigations. The present work is based upon the Golden Section, the Greek theory of proportional relationships which has often been credited with magical properties. John Yau wrote:
Within the terms proposed by Rockburne's use of the Golden Section, geometry is a system of proportional interrelationships rather than a system of measurements. In this regard, her work parallels Mondrian's who distilled the grid underlying Cubism to what he called a "dynamic equilibrium" of architectonic balances and chromatic disruptions. By using the irreducibility of proportions as the foundation of their geometry, both Mondrian and Rockburne are able to make their work allude to the figure, as well as to what exists beyond the limits of human knowledge. (J. Yau, Dorothea Rockburne, New Work: Cut-Ins, New York, 1989, unpaginated)
In works like the present one, Rockburne employs her characteristic device of folding the sheet in order to underscore its own interior principles, transforming each sheet into a dynamic object.
Within the terms proposed by Rockburne's use of the Golden Section, geometry is a system of proportional interrelationships rather than a system of measurements. In this regard, her work parallels Mondrian's who distilled the grid underlying Cubism to what he called a "dynamic equilibrium" of architectonic balances and chromatic disruptions. By using the irreducibility of proportions as the foundation of their geometry, both Mondrian and Rockburne are able to make their work allude to the figure, as well as to what exists beyond the limits of human knowledge. (J. Yau, Dorothea Rockburne, New Work: Cut-Ins, New York, 1989, unpaginated)
In works like the present one, Rockburne employs her characteristic device of folding the sheet in order to underscore its own interior principles, transforming each sheet into a dynamic object.