Untitled

The paintings that have long defined Rothenberg’s career feature horses. In these canvases, many of them produced between 1975 and 1980, Rothenberg depicted a singular horse leaping across or standing before a vacant space. Black in Place, 1976, which was included in American Painting: The Eighties, is one of these: a black horse framed by the silhouette of an orange triangle floats on a rectangular orange background. “The horse was a symbol of people, a self-portrait, really,” Rothenberg once said. They earned her a place in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s famed New Image Painting exhibition. They were a hit with critics: “The pictorial evocation of checked, dislocated, tortured mind/body states makes for [a kind of intensity],” Peter Schjeldahl wrote in an Artforum review. The headline of the artist’s obituary in The New York Times stated that she “….breathed new life into painting when the genre was under siege in the 1970s.

Ronnie and John Shore purchased this untitled drawing as an homage to Black in Place, which is now part of the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection in New York City.