Focus: Susan Rothenberg

There’s a silence that hums inside her paintings. A stillness made of motion. Horses, limbs, and shadows flicker between spirit and flesh, gesture and ground. Emerging in the 1970s, she reintroduced figuration to abstraction, bridging Minimalism’s restraint with the raw instinct to see ourselves in form.

Her studio became her landscape—dust, light, and distance folding into the work. In the isolation of the New Mexican high desert, she found space to think, to breathe, to walk and to see. It was both a pause and a pulse, a rhythm within her steadfast dedication to painting. She believed the studio itself, simply being in it, was the opening, the place where something great could happen.

To look at her work is to feel motion in stillness—a pulse beneath the quiet. You may stumble across beauty, but it isn’t the point. It arrives as residue, the result of soothing deeper, something human, raw, and searching in her communication of paint on canvas.

KIN celebrates artists who shape emotion into form.

Susan Rothenberg, gesture as truth, painting as devotion. She is an artist we can’t stop thinking about—someone whose presence lingers long after her passing. Her voice still echoes in our minds, a reminder that the act of painting, of simply showing up, can hold the entirety of what it means to be alive.