Raquel Rabinovich (b. 1929, Buenos Aires, Argentina–Lives and works in Rhinebeck, New York)
Raquel Rabinovich is a New York-based, Argentine-American artist known for her monochromatic paintings and drawings, large-scale glass sculptural environments, and site-specific stone installations along the shores of the Hudson River.
Throughout her artistic career, Rabinovich has worked with a wide range of media, including drawing, collage, painting, sculpture, and installation. Informed by her underlying fascination with the ineffable nature of existence,Rabinovich’s work embodies the concealed aspects of existence that lie behind the appearance of things, thoughts, language, and the world. Exploring what she calls the “dark source,” the artist attempts to reveal how that which is concealed emerges into view, making the invisible visible. This seemingly insoluble conundrum has been central to Rabinovich’s art practice, shaping the essence of her oeuvre for the last sixty years.
Born in Buenos Aires in 1929 into a Russian and Romanian Jewish immigrant family, Rabinovich was raised in Córdoba, Argentina. A political prisoner under Juan Domingo Perón’s regime, Rabinovich later moved to Europe where she would reside and study throughout the mid-late 1950s. Eventually Rabinovich settled in the United States in 1967 and currently resides in Rhinebeck, New York.
Rabinovich’s travels to India, Nepal, Indonesia, Ecuador and Peru have had a profound impact on her practice, as she is repeatedly drawn to ancient spaces of silence and darkness such as temples and caves, deeply connecting with the authentic and rooted ancient traditions. This idea of silence and darkness, both literally and metaphorically, have led her to explore the ground’s relationship with the spiritual, its history and its usage, using mud and glass as metaphors for the passage of time and the ephemeral nature of existence.
Her work is also informed by her love of poetry. She connects her practice to the non-literal and magical worlds in Latin American literature and the liminal space between the lines found in texts by Latin American writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Gabriel García Márquez, and Luisa Valenzuela, as seen in her ongoing series of works on paper titled When Silence Becomes Poetry.
Rabinovich has been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including the 2011–2012 Lee Krasner Award for Lifetime Achievement from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and is included in the Oral History Program of the Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art.
