Susan Rothenberg

Catalogue entry

P07740 Head and Bones 1980

Woodcut 13 × 11 1/4 (330 × 286) on paper 26 × 18 7/8 (659 × 480) watermarked ‘RIVES’; printed by Gretchen Gelb at Aeropress, New York, published by Multiples Inc., New York, in an edition of 20
Inscribed ‘S Rothenberg 80’ b.r. and ‘12/20’; impressed with the printer's and publisher's stamps
Purchased from Multiples Inc. (Grant-in-Aid) 1982
Lit: Susan Rothenberg Prints 1977–1984, exhibition catalogue, Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston, March 1984, no.7, repr.

This woodcut is from a group of four, Rothenberg's first editioned woodcuts, all made in 1980 with Gretchen Gelb at Patricia Branstead's Aeropress studio for the publisher Marion Goodman of Multiples. In the spring of that year Rothenberg had made four series, each of between three and six varying impressions, of unique woodcuts using pine blocks and she had previously made a set of fifteen variations on a single oak block. The image is closely related to Rothenberg's paintings, in which she had developed the use of a heavily outlined horse into the use of fragments of the same kind of figures - in this case a head and two vertical leg bones, with other less specific but equally resonant bone-like forms.

Published in:
The Tate Gallery 1982-84: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions, London 1986

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