From Carnegie Hall to the Alchemist's Kitchen:
The Work of Andrea Rosenberg
The Work of Andrea Rosenberg
"When I come to the page with a pencil in my hand, there is a pause, and then I make a line without corrections, and it can be intuitive because it is practiced. But I'm always surprised by the results, and the element of surprise is part of the energy."
Andrea Rosenberg, from an interview
conducted by
David Galloway (April 15, 2002)
The table that commands the center of the atelier is a dense assemblage of tools and materials, where pots of gesso jostle with tubes of paint, solvents, oil-sticks, aerosol cans, pastels, pencils and brushes. If this tablescape suggests an alchemist's kitchen, the parallel is not entirely coincidental. (Nor is the fact that the artist loves to cook, and that her kitchen is centered around a similar tablescape of potential ingredients.)
There are clear advantages to having materials within arm's reach, especially if the creative process itself embraces an element of improvisation. But the sheer material surfeit, also reflected in the encyclopedic range of papers available for use here, points to the alchemist's kitchen as depicted, for example, in a sixteenth century drawing by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The goal of this medieval laboratory was the transformation of base materials into a higher physical state: mixing copper with tin, for example, to produce the harder, sonorous and more durable alloy of bronze.
Andrea Rosenberg, too, conjures up transformations. To describe the results as "mixed-media" works is both inevitable and inadequate, for the stress then rests squarely on the ingredients. Yet neither drawing nor painting offers a sufficient tag, since what we encounter is a continuous interplay between those classical genres: typically the layering and interlaminating of painterly and graphic activities, sometimes suggestive of a palimpsest. The results range from postcard-sized formats that seem to glow with the intense inner light of Persian miniatures to compositions whose dimensions correspond to those of the human body. The bravura effect of the recent works on canvas, which measure nine feet in height, explodes every conventional concept of "drawing."
Though the most consistent motifs in the artist's repertoire consist of pears and flowers, the true subject of these works is the process which lends them their very existence. Rhythm, line, color, materiality are cardinal concerns, and the dictates of botany repeatedly yield to the seductive choreography of the drawn line, while the gestural preempts the mimetic. The ostensible "subject," furthermore, occupies no real, measurable space but is suspended within the pictorial field and thus virtually abstracted. There is no horror vacui here; on the contrary, emptiness achieves its own lyrical value؏above all, of course, in the large formats.
On first encounter, the viewer might tend to regard the smaller compositions as studies for the large-scale works. They fulfill this function, however, only to the extent that they permit a wide range of experimentation with theme and variation within a relatively short period of time. In this manner, a gestural flow is prompted which may subsequently find extended expression in the larger formats. Yet these are never simple "enlargements." First of all, their very scale prompts the use of a body language which lends these works an expressive corporeality absent from the miniatures.
Nevertheless, in whatever format or material a work may be executed, the shaping line is unmistakably that of Andrea Rosenberg; sensuous and expressive but also probing, it is executed with amazing sureness, even at those moments when it seems to flaunt a kind of meandering nonchalance. This, too, is a measure of the self-assurance of her line, which empowers improvisation but brooks no corrections and no repetitions. In addition to their graphic (even calligraphic) sovereignty, one of the most striking stylistic hallmarks of these compositions is their intriguingly finished-unfinished air. The artist herself lays great stress on this aspect of her own oeuvre: "Stop before it's done," she insists, and before the results become too self-consciously aesthetic. Once more, technique calls attention to process, automatically involving the viewer in the completion of the work.
For similar reasons, Rosenberg builds moments of chance and surprise into the working process itself—through changing paper, for instance, and hence confronting herself with different textures, different qualities of resistance. (She has also worked on glass, plaster and fabric, as well as exploring the full range of printmaking techniques.) And while certain formats are recurrent, virtually standard, there are sudden shifts here, too—especially in more recent works, where the unconventional dimensions introduce an element of unfamiliarity. "I don't want to be too comfortable, to be able to predict, to play tricks," Rosenberg insists. Hence she may suddenly, even radically shift her palette. While a parchment-or flesh-colored ground usually provides the field for graphic activity, it may yield to a burst of magenta, chrome yellow or turquoise. This grounding, furthermore, does not simply support or "contain" the image but literally interacts with it.
Typically, a work retains traces of its own making. Holes remain where a sheet of paper was pinned to the wall, along with finger smudges and dribbles of paint. An edge of paper may well be torn away from a roll, rather than cut; unmatted and hung loosely within a frame, the individual sheet proudly bears this "scar" received at the moment of its genesis. All such strategies reflect the organic nature of works which deal with organic themes: with new life spiraling upward from a fat tulip or amaryllis bulb, with a succulently ripe pear, the translucent petals of a poppy, a feathery stalk of paper whites. The sensuality, even overt sexuality, of such subjects cannot be ignored; nor can the contrast between masculine and feminine forms - between the erectile thrust of the amaryllis, for example, and the succulent curves of a pear.
Dialectic, in fact, is perhaps the true "motor" of Rosenberg's work. Here we encounter a continuous, lively interplay between abstraction and realism, surface and ground, growth and decay, between movement and stasis, center and edge, light and shadow, between genres and between genders. And even where gender is not an issue, some works demonstrate a conspicuous muscularity, while others seem fragile, faded, even desiccated. It is the latter category which Charles Dee Mitchell no doubt had in mind when, in the catalogue essay accompanying Andrea Rosenberg's exhibition at Dallas's McKinney Avenue Contemporary in 2000, he remarked that "The image of pressed flowers hovers over many of the drawings."
Mitchell's metaphor points toward a seeming anomaly in the works (or perhaps only to a further example of their fundamentally dialectic nature): for all their feeling of modernity, their use of fruit and flower motifs may seem oddly anachronistic. In fact, Rosenberg's oeuvre can be seen in a long, distinguished tradition which extends from the earliest days of modernism to the most recent post-modernist sallies. This is not the occasion to trace that lineage in detail, but one can at least suggest a few of its highlights. They include, most obviously, the still-lifes of Cézanne and Matisse, but also the geometrically flattened forms of Gerald Murphy's "Wasp and Pear." For sheer sensuousness, Rosenberg's flowers bear comparison with those of Georgia O'Keefe and Robert Mapplethorpe; for economy of line, with those of David Hockney or, even more trenchantly, with the virtuoso flower-drawings of Ellsworth Kelly. And a fascinating discourse could be shaped through closer examination of the four-screen video installation by Turkish artist Kutlug Ataman, entitled "The Four Seasons of Veronica Read" (2002). One of the highlights of Documenta 11, it records the love of a simple Englishwoman for the amaryllis and the seasonal rituals to which bulb and flower must be treated.
Fascinating as it might be to explore this larger context, one consequence of such an investigation would surely be to confirm our own intuitive sense of being in the presence of a unique form-language. And it may well owe more to jazz than to art history. One of Rosenberg's favorite memories dates to 1965, when she attended a concert by Thelonius Monk at Carnegie Hall. Looking back, she places that "seminal moment" on a level with her regular visits to New York's Metropolitan Museum or her discovery, as a teenager studying at the Art Students League, of a book on the works of Egon Schiele. "Monk," she recalls, "always returned to that moment of simplicity—then of completion. He knew when to stop. No matter how involving, he understood when to stop. And that's very important to me in the drawings." The parallels between Monk's structured, sometimes dissonant improvisations and the drawings of Andrea Rosenberg number among the most intriguing of the speculations prompted by this rich oeuvre.
David Galloway (April 15, 2002)
David Galloway
