Horse Power: Susan Rothenberg’s Iterative Images
Installation view, Susan Rothenberg. The Weather at Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street. 4 September–18 October 2025. © 2025 The Estate of Susan Rothenberg / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Thomas Barratt.
A teleological history of painting might look something like this: it originated on walls, first in caves, then in churches. It was pigment on stone, and it stayed in place. When it left the wall, it landed first on wooden panels, heavy but movable. Then came the Venetians with their abundant canvas, which made paintings even easier to transport—and to sell to the newly powerful merchant class. The shift from permanence towards portability engendered a whole array of technical and conceptual evolutions, and by the mid-20th century, painting had been distilled to its barest elements: image (pop), color (color field), and geometric grids (minimalism). In the conceptual years that followed, it appeared that painting had run its course—that it had been so thoroughly reduced that it evaporated into air.
Susan Rothenberg rescued painting from the immaterial by returning it to that primeval place: the cave wall where hands first charted familiar shapes. In the wild Soho of the 1970s, her striking, spartan paintings of horses in profile promised both a return to representation and a synthesis of the heady conceptual concerns that had been fermenting during her time. In these canvases, one finds minimalist reduction, post-minimalist seriality, and expressionist anima all in one picture plane. These are singular, oneiric images that are nevertheless iterative and diagrammatic, which meaningfully expanded the bounds of painting in her era. Much of the figuration that arose in New York in the following decades owes something to Rothenberg and her horses.
Susan Rothenberg, Mary I, 1974. Acrylic and tempera on canvas, 117.5 x 198.1 x 4.4 cm / 46 1/4 x 78 x 1 3/4 in. Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer.
It’s a bold choice, then, for Hauser & Wirth’s first exhibition of Rothenberg’s work to feature so few of her famous equine canvases. In The Weather, there are just two horse paintings, and only one in her iconic left-profile 70s format. As the tone-setting show for Hauser, which started representing Rothenberg’s estate in May, the selection on view feels a bit slight, but the picture of Rothenberg that emerges from the exhibition is one that allows other facets of her practice to shine through, especially her formal rigor and her skill as a colorist. As far as career-spanning gallery exhibitions go, The Weather is sparse yet thoughtful—it helps that Rothenberg’s work remains stupefyingly powerful.
The first gallery presents a quartet of paintings that essentially serve as a thesis statement for Rothenberg’s characteristic compositions and facture. There are two of her Mary paintings, made in 1974, which feature fellow artist Mary Woronov (who Rothenberg painted from memory) standing, hunched over like an animal, in that trademark left-facing profile. They’re rendered in a scumbled sienna that, together with the simple silhouettes, connote the mineral pigments of cave sites like Lascaux. But there’s a mark of the modern here, too: a bisecting vertical line straight out of a Jasper Johns canvas that splits the picture plane and Mary herself in two, calling attention to the canvas as a segmented geometric space. This is carried in Dos Equis (1974), a large-scale painting that features two overlapping horses that are each crossed through with x’s, again imbuing these totemic forms with a gridded anatomy that traces back to the minimalists. The final painting in this room, a 90s work titled Yellow Cat (1996–97), completes the compositional gamut, this time featuring an ochre form suspended upside-down à la Georg Baselitz. The throughline is apparent: whether horse, woman, or cat, Rothenberg treats her figures more as references than representations, freely slicing them, dicing them, flipping them this way or that.
Susan Rothenberg, Dos Equis, 1974. Acrylic and tempera on canvas, 169.9 x 296.2 x 4.1 cm / 66 7/8 x 116 5/8 x 15/8in. Photo: Object Studies.
The back two galleries pick up on this compositional program while varying the scale, and especially the color, of works on display. The earth tones of the Mary paintings and Yellow Cat are traded out for deep blacks and blues or vast fields of bone-white, and eventually become verdant, Monet-like veils of purple or green. I was particularly happy to see the early painting Foxes on a Hill (1972), a work that encapsulates so much of what is great about Rothenberg. It’s rendered almost entirely in a rich Giotto blue, with little distinction between figure and ground. The hill is really just a scant outline drawn over that undulating color—the only real forms are the two foxes, black and lightning-like, which appear to be fleeing something terrifying in the mass of sky behind them. There is so much symbolic power in this scene, yet its components are glaringly simple: a mound that crests halfway into frame and two fox-forms that could be duplicates of one another, like a black stamp pressed twice in succession. The diagrammatic flatness of painting and its mythological depth: almost nothing, yet so much.
Susan Rothenberg, Foxes on a Hill, 1972. Acrylic on canvas, 134.9 x 197.8 x 4.4 cm / 53 1/8 x 77 7/8 x 1 ¾ in. Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer.
Repetition is a major element of the works in these back galleries, which span from the 70s up until Rothenberg’s death in 2020. The best of them showcase a free manipulation of scale and subject that utilizes the radical image techniques of pop art’s mechanical processes. See Our Lord (1979), for example, with its duplicated masturbating forms floating in a black field: atavistic, like a man projecting a tulpa of himself, but also a bit like a xeroxed image. Or Blue Frontal (1978), which frames its nightmarish front-facing horse in an archway of inverted horse-hooves. Her images are not just doubled or bisected, but are blown up, shrunken, turned into architecture. Her formal experiments remain consistent, even as her imagery changes.
Eventually, as Rothenberg puts it, “the horse just ran out” of her paintings.[1] The last gallery showcases her later works, made after she and her husband Bruce Nauman moved to New Mexico. These paintings are awash in color, shifting purple or green, or are otherwise populated by resolutely human forms—this time with faces and emotions, not just segmented silhouettes. Her concerns are much the same: figure and ground, repetition and reposition, richness of color. The most striking work is Untitled (Band and Hands Green) (2018), made two years before her death. It pictures a mass of hands emerging, swamplike, to pull at an empty white circle, the kind of neutral silhouette that shows up so frequently in her work. There’s a shadow of violence to the painting—are they pulling the shape under? Are they attempting to snap its taut borders? Possibly. Or maybe they are indulging in that original primeval impulse: to mark paint on a wall in a shape that is familiar.
Susann Rothenberg, Blue Frontal, 1978. Acrylic, Flashe, and tempera on canvas, 200.7 x 228.6 x 3.2 cm / 79 x 90 x 1 1/4 in. Photo: Object Studies.
Susan Rothenberg: The Weather is on view at Hauser & Wirth from September 4 through October 18, 2025.
[1] Joan Simon, Susan Rothenberg (Harry N. Abrams, 1991), 87.
