Dorothea Rockburne:
the light shines in the darkness
and the darkness has not understood it
Organized by Lola Kramer
Bernheim, London
Opening November 21, 2024
Dorothea Rockburne: The Light Shines in the Darkness, and the Darkness Has Not Understood It
Organized by Lola Kramer
Bernheim, London Opening November 21, 2024
1 New Burlington St, W1S 2JF,
London, UK
LONDON –– Bernheim Gallery is thrilled to announce the first solo show by Dorothea Rockburne in its London gallery. Rockburne's work has not been displayed in London since her 1973 solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery.
This will be her first historic European survey, and many artworks will be displayed outside of America for the first time. Spanning over four decades of her work, this exhibition, titled The Light Shines in the Darkness and the Darkness Has Not Understood It, aims to display the importance of her work not only as a female abstract painter whose work finds its main inspiration in mathematics and astronomy but as a major figure of American art. Her influence on a younger generation of artists dealing in abstraction, formalism, and color theory is incommensurable. The fragility of some of these works has prevented a larger audience from having access to seeing them in person. With a team of assistants, Rockburne will recreate the work "Domain of the Variable,” created in 1972 and recently presented for her exhibition at Dia: Beacon in red. For this occasion, Rockburne is revising Domain of the Variable in blue. This artwork was featured on the cover of Artforum in March 1972.
The first comprehensive, career-spanning study of American artist Dorothea Rockburne, edited by Eva Diaz, will also be published by Dia Art Foundation in September 2024.
About the Artist
Dorothea Rockburne was born in 1932 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.