Dorothea Rockburne:
the light shines in the darkness
and the darkness has not understood it
Curated by Lola Kramer
Bernheim, London
November 21, 2024 - January 25, 2025
Dorothea Rockburne: The Light Shines in the Darkness, and the Darkness Has Not Understood It
Curated by Lola Kramer
Bernheim, London
November 21, 2024 - January 25, 2025
1 New Burlington St, W1S 2JF,
London, UK
About the Artist
Dorothea Rockburne was born in 1929 in Montreal, where she studied art and philosophy before attending Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina, from 1950 to 1954. While at Black Mountain, Rockburne met the mathematician Max Dehn, whose tutelage in concepts including harmonic intervals, topology, and set theory profoundly influenced her art practice. After moving to New York City in 1954, she became involved with the nascent Judson Dance Theater and later participated in Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy (1964), among other notable performances. In the late 1960s, Rockburne began exhibiting paintings made with industrial materials and creating drawings from crude oil and graphite that were applied to paper and chipboard. Her works, based on set theory, which the artist calls “visual equations,” were first exhibited in New York in 1970. Later phases of Rockburne’s painting practice draw on ancient systems of proportion and astronomical phenomena.
From 2018 to 2022, Dia Beacon presented Dorothea Rockburne’s large-scale works from the late 1960s and early 1970s, followed by an expanded exhibition focusing on works produced in the early 1970s through the early 1980s. Her work has also been featured in two solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1981 and 2013–14) and a major retrospective at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York (2011), which traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal.
Rockburne lives in New York City.