Works by Carrol Dunham and Susan Rothenberg installed

[Left to right] Carrol Dunham, Red Sun in the Morning, 1999/2000; Susan Rothenberg, Dominos-Hot, 2001-2002
Like a comet streaking toward earth, or earth itself on a collision course with its mirror image, Dunham's red star and its corona of snarling, blade-wielding polyp-males and polyp-females is a vision of Armageddon in the battle of the sexes. No one is behaving well and all are rendered with special attention to grotesque organs, lips, and orifices of which the star has several crater-like examples of its own. Here the dally media fare of sex-and-violence has been transformed into a gleefully obscene Punch and Judy show. Blink and the red star surrounded by pencil scribbles and spitting brush shokes launes Adolph Gottlieb, Cy Twombly, and Helen Frankenthaler (who wouldn't be caught dead in this company, but wam? invited anyway). Blink again, and it a slapstick waring against self-destruction and a rolluat cure on who are complicitous in that looming calamity. The image in a painting by Susan Rothenberg is the last stage of an incremental process of statement, revision, cancellation, and restatement. In this cycle the subject may be well defined at the start or vague, something that accumulates around a firmly delineated form, or the gradual coming into focus of what at the outset was only dimly perceived. Attrition or erosion may also be factors. Some pictures constitute the residue of many decisions in the course of which the original premise has been lost or has morphed into something initially unforeseen. All of which is to say that Rothenberg's style is the organic product of her method. In her work the imagination comes alive on the material surface of a pigment loaded canvas; premeditation just gets things rolling. Once that starts. the only check on where they go is the authenticity of the marks required to bring the image into being and the critical intelligence that ponders the result, is convinced by it, or compelled to transform is yet again. Hewing to this direct approach while keeping all other variables as simple as possible, Rothenberg has made pictures of astonishing variety beginning with the s houetted horses of the 1970s and passing through emblematic heads and bodies in the early to mid-1980s to choreographic and narrative scenes in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and for the past decade and a fialf atmospheric Interiors and landscapes of many moods. While there is an almost naturalistic quality to some-horses and other animals going about their business in a swirl of light-suffused strokes a much odder type of figuration has appeared in recent depictions of men and women competing at dominoes or poker. The alter nating meatiness and disembodied aura of their outsized noses, eyes, and ears-and the manner it which the components of their faces seem to float free of one another-combine hobgoblin locks with 3 Cheshire Cat capacity to disappear and reapoest. That said, Rothenberg's pictures are entirely grown-up bed time stories. And if some observers sense affinities with Philip Guston's grotesque brutes, the basis for this comparison does not lie in any common interest in political caricature or personal allegory-Rothenberg's not a literary painter-but ultimately in the feeling one has that the image was not executed but arrived at its strangeness is not willed but intrinsic to an open-ended search for things to paint that seem only to have made themselves known to the artist as they make them selves known to us.
Text written by Curator Rob Storr for the exhibition catalog.