Born January 20, 1945 

Died May 18, 2020

Susan Rothenberg was born in Buffalo, New York in 1945. She was an American contemporary painter, printmaker, and sculptor. She graduated from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 1965, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. In 1967, she went to Washington, D.C., and studied at George Washington University and the Corcoran Museum School, before moving to New York in 1969.

Rothenberg’s work has been shown internationally in museums and galleries, including a major survey which traveled from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie Institute, and Tate Gallery in London, among others (1983-1985). A retrospective organized by Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York in 1992 travelled to Washington DC, Chicago, and Seattle among others. In 1996 she had a retrospective at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneous in Mexico and her exhibition Susan Rothenberg: Paintings from the Nineties was at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston from 1999-2000.

Her drawings and prints are of subjects that have, for her admirers, become familiar – figures in motion, snake and animal heads, an arm in a muscle flex and the head of a figure contemplating its hands.

She worked with a number of master printers and achieved recognition as an innovator in several areas. Because she was comfortable working on a large scale in her paintings it is not surprising that her prints also stretched the limits of scale.