For me, making art is also a transformative confrontation. The very execution of the work- whether drawing, painting or sculpture – leads me to experience no gate or barrier, the work and I become one, there is no more inside or outside. The process of working – layer upon layer of lines paint glass or stone – seems to obliterate what is not and reveal what is left, what I call “essence.” To apprehend this essence, which is beyond thought and has no boundaries, the viewer too needs to go through a gateless gate.
– Raquel Rabinovich
Hutchinson Modern & Contemporary is pleased to announce Raquel Rabinovich: Portals. Featuring a selection of the artist’s work from the 1960s to the present, the exhibition is the first solo presentation of Rabinovich’s work at the gallery and will be on view from September 9 through November 5, 2021.
Over the course of a seventy-year-long career, New York-based Argentinian-American artist Raquel Rabinovich (b. 1929, Buenos Aires) has been concerned with the paradox of making the invisible visible. Her interest in mythology, existence, poetry, nature, and transcendence is reflected in her monochromatic paintings and drawings, as well as in her sculptural practice that encompasses large-scale glass environments and site-specific stone installations along the shores of the Hudson River. Exploring a range of material choices and artistic processes, Rabinovich’s work seeks to convey “that which is concealed emerging into view.”
This exhibition centers around the artist’s fascination with the concept of portals, liminal spaces that invite the viewer to metaphorically enter into the universe of her work. In the early 1960s, Rabinovich began a series of near-monochromatic works titled The Dark is Light Enough. These textural abstract paintings, realized in a spectrum of grays and earthy hues, marked the beginning of a lifelong investigation into what Rabinovich calls the “dark source.” For Rabinovich, the dark represents neither negativity nor absence but a rich realm of knowledge and wisdom. Each subsequent body of work continues that investigation while attempting to access the “concealed aspects of existence which lie behind the appearance of things, thoughts, language, and the world.”
