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Susan Rothenberg Ignites New York with a Storm of Painting

Susan Rothenberg Ignites New York with a Storm of Painting September 3, 2025Art Events, New YorkOff

Susan Rothenberg: The Weather of Existence

Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street
4 September – 18 October 2025

This autumn in New York, Hauser & Wirth unveils The Weather—the gallery’s first exhibition devoted entirely to the late Susan Rothenberg (1945–2020). It is not simply a retrospective, but a storm of memory, gesture, and raw intensity: 14 paintings spanning decades of her career, some rarely seen, others never before revealed, gathered to create a climate as haunting as it is exhilarating.

Rothenberg was never a painter of surfaces—she was a painter of atmospheres. From the iconic horse glyphs that shattered minimalism in the 1970s to the fractured bodies and spectral heads that followed, her canvases were charged with an electric field she herself called the weather. Each painting hums with that pressure, where intuition and rigor collide, and where images emerge like lightning across a turbulent sky.

There is intimacy here too: works she kept close, lived with, tucked away for decades, now stepping into the light. Palm prints ghost the edges of Outline (1978). The fiery contours of Red Head (1981) speak of tools and defiance. The spectral Las Blancas (1996–97), painted after a near-death encounter, suspends the viewer in the fragile space between mortality and dream. And in one of her final works, Untitled (Green Hands with Band) (2018), hands stretch outward—urgent, elegiac, aching for contact.

Critic Peter Schjeldahl once wrote that her paintings “hit higher than the viscera.” Indeed, Rothenberg’s genius was to make canvases that were both primal and cerebral, violent and serene, utterly immediate yet endlessly enigmatic.

In parallel with the exhibition, Hauser & Wirth Publishers will release Susan Rothenberg. The Weather, a sumptuous monograph tracing her trajectory—from the monumental horses that made her name, through the fragmented human forms of the 1980s, to the desert-infused dramas of her New Mexico years.

Rothenberg leaves us with more than paintings; she leaves us with climates of the soul. To step into this exhibition is to step into her weather—stormy, luminous, unforgettable.

Susan Rothenberg. The Weather
4 September – 18 October 2025
Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street

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