Susan Rothenberg

Susan Rothenberg (Buffalo, New York, 1945 – Galisteo, New Mexico, 2020) was an American painter who also worked as a printmaker, sculptor and draughtswoman. She became known in the 1970s through images of horses that merged abstraction and figuration, a balance that places her among the most original artists of her generation.

She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Cornell University in 1965 and then studied in Washington, D.C. In 1969 she moved to New York City, where she joined a community of artists. Her large, mostly monochrome acrylic paintings of life-sized horses established her reputation in the New York art world in the early 1970s. Her first solo show in New York, in 1975 at the 112 Greene Street Gallery, brought imagery into a scene dominated by minimalism.

From the early 1980s she painted disembodied heads and body parts, and later complex, colourful figurative works. After moving to a ranch near Galisteo, New Mexico, her paintings became suffused with colour, and from the 1990s she drew on experienced events and worked mainly in oil. Her work is often compared with that of Georgia O'Keeffe, a comparison she rejected. Her legacy lies in restoring figuration and expression to painting and in her contributions to drawing.