Tuesday, Feb 7, 2012
‘Journeys and Topologies,’ an exhibition of recent paintings by Deborah Rosenthal, professor of Fine Arts at Rider, will run through February 25 at the Bowery Gallery in New York.
Journeys and Topologies, an exhibition of recent paintings by Deborah Rosenthal, professor of Fine Arts at Rider, will run through February 25 at the Bowery Gallery in New York. Located at 530 W. 25th Street in Manhattan, on the fourth floor, the Bowery Gallery is open from Tuesday through Saturday, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
The exhibition features several kinds of invented compositions. In the small paintings of the Journeys series, Rosenthal inscribes human figures within linear armatures on opaquely painted grounds. The short and rhythmical lines and intervals in these compositions reflect their origins in the rhythms and scale of art songs, particularly Schubert’s “Die Winterreise” (Winter Journey). The Topologies are invented landscapes with forms evoking mountainous terrain. Large reciprocal curves or stark oppositions of dark and light frame the tensions that carry us through the imagined space.
Rosenthal has shown at the Bowery Gallery since 1984. Her paintings and prints have also been shown widely in venues including the Painting Center, Lori Bookstein Fine Art, and the Francis Naumann Gallery in New York. Her work has also been exhibited at the University of Richmond Museums in Virginia, at the Huntington Museum in West Virginia, and in university galleries nationally. Her 1998 solo exhibition, Eve’s Vocabulary, traveled from Hebrew Union College in New York to Yale University and to the Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art.
Rosenthal’s work has been discussed and reproduced in the pages of many publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art in America, Modern Painters, the New York Sun, and on artcritical.com.
She was also featured, along with her husband, renowned art critic Jed Perl of The New Republic, in the April 2009 edition of Yale Review. The journal – the nation’s oldest literary quarterly – included 10 pages of their collaborative book project entitled About Borromini, inspired by the Baroque architect Francesco Borromini (1599-1667). The feature includes five of Rosenthal’s prints, along with five accompanying texts by Perl.
A recipient of an NEA Critic’s Grant, Rosenthal has published extensively on art, in such publications as Arts, Art in America, Artforum, Modern Painters, The New Criterion, and Drawing, among others. She is a consulting editor for Arcade Publishing, working on the series of books called Artists and Art.
Rosenthal has been faculty and guest artist in many institutions, including Stanford University, the New York Studio School, the Queens College M.F.A. program, Chautauqua, Ox-Bow, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and, most recently, as a Visiting Artist at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill.
