The next Artist You Need To Know is Dorothea Rockburne.
Dorothea Rockburne is a Canadian abstract painter : she is strongly influenced by mathematics and astronomy in her often geometric works that can seem superficially simplistic but that are her attempts to embody larger concepts.
“I wanted very much to see the equations I was studying, so I started making them in my studio. I was visually solving equations.”
Born in Montreal in 1929, Rockburne was afflicted with pneumonia as a child which didn’t prevent her from taking weekend art classes at Montreal’s Ecole des Beaux-Arts. She relocated to the U.S. and began attending the renowned Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1950. This space was instrumental in not just the careers of a number of artists over a large period of the twentieth century, but was also essential in shaping culture in the United States. During her time there, Rockburne not only studied with the visual artists Franz Kline, Philip Guston, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham but also the mathematician Max Dehn (who arguably had a more decisive effect on her art and ideas than her teachers in visual arts).
In 1955, she moved to New York City and became emmeshed in the vibrant art scene in the city at that time across genres (including the minimalist dancer / performer Yvonne Rainer).
Rockburne mounted a major solo show of her work in 1958, but despite external praise and recognition, she was unhappy with it and for more than a decade declined to exhibit any of her two dimensional works, focusing more upon dance and performance art. She worked with the Judson Dance Theater and also attended classes at the American Ballet Theatre, supporting herself by working in the service industry and acting as studio manager for her friend (and fellow Black Mountain alumni) Robert Rauschenberg.
In 1970, Rockburne began showing her art again, most notably with Bykert Gallery in NYC, presenting installations that created spaces wherein the works and the viewers could engage with the mathematical concepts that were still the impetus for her art. Many of her works are monumental, and don’t so much hang in a gallery space as define it in an architectural manner that creates an environment the visitor moves through.
From the National Museum of Women in the Arts : “Since then she has produced numerous series of largely monochromatic works known as painted structures, inspired by such diverse sources as the Golden Section, Italian Renaissance frescoes, and Mandelbrot’s ideas about fractals. Rockburne’s body of work is unified by her desire to reveal processes; her creations are neither drawings nor paintings nor sculptures, but reside amid these categories.”
Rockburne has exhibited widely over her career. Notable exhibitions include a retrospective at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York, in 2011 and a solo exhibition at MOMA in 2013. She was also in the exhibition Women in Abstraction in 2021 at Centre Pompidou in Paris. A more detailed listing of her exhibitions can be seen here.
She has earned a number of honours and awards, as well : Rockburne is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Academy of Design, and The Century Association. She was recognized as the Honourary Vice President of the National Association of Women Artists in 2009 and is also a member of the American Abstract Artists.
The images below are from the series Locus, 1972.
Ella Nixon, writing for ArtReview, offers the following : “Procedure and geometry characterise the work of American artist Dorothea Rockburne….One can imagine the nonagenarian Rockburne sitting down to make calculations and then transforming numbers into precise line using ruler and compass. This fusion of mathematics and art reflects her interdisciplinary training […and she seeks] to discover maths in nature: organising principles, drawn from probability theory and set theory, underpin her abstract works.”
Much more about Rockburne’s life and art can be seen here, at her site, which has many links with articles and videos about her career..