Untitled

"Typically Rothenberg's pictures are a mass of marks representing attempts to define something both insistent and elusive. However, the tensions concentrated and released by her trial and error method are not self-dramatizing. Instead they are the exertions of someone dissatisfied by schematic approximation but compelled to accept phenomenological contingency. In other words, she is someone for whom a stylized sign is not enough but who is nevertheless obliged to acknowledge that the strokes, textures, and colors in which she finally recognizes her subject are inherently unstable and incomplete. And so, rather than evoke an archetype out of the collective unconscious or an icon of ancient origin, the image that crystallizes out of the white nothing in front of her refers to immediate experience, or to an emblem which has, through repetition, become the vessel for graphic and psychological experiences here and now" (R. Storr, "A Core Sampling" in Susan Rothenberg: Drawings 1974-2004, exh. cat., New York, Sperone Westwater, 2004).