Susan Rothenberg

Susan Charna Rothenberg was born in 1945, in Buffalo, New York. She earned a BFA from Cornell University in 1967, having studied sculpture before turning to painting, then briefly enrolled at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., leaving after only a few weeks before settling in New York City.

Her first solo exhibition, at the alternative space 112 Greene Street in SoHo in 1975, introduced the large-scale horse paintings that would define her early reputation, works that fused an emphatic, gestural surface with a single recognizable image. She began showing with the Willard Gallery in New York the following year, and in 1978 her work appeared in the Whitney Museum's New Image Painting, an exhibition that gave a name to a generation of artists working between abstraction and figuration. In 1980 she was included in Drawings: The Pluralist Decade at the American Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, representing the United States; she did so again in 2007.

In 1987 Rothenberg began a long relationship with the gallery Sperone Westwater, which represented her and, later, her estate for nearly four decades. She married the artist Bruce Nauman and later moved with him to a ranch near Galisteo, New Mexico, where she continued to paint. Her honors included the Skowhegan Medal for Painting and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts; exact award years are not confirmed in current sources. A major retrospective organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum and other institutions from 1992 to 1994, and a later survey, Moving in Place, toured from 2009 to 2011.

Susan Rothenberg died on May 18, 2020, in Galisteo, New Mexico, at the age of 75, according to Richard Gray Gallery; her age at death and her decades-long home in Galisteo are corroborated by Walker Art Center and The New Yorker.

Rothenberg's reputation rests on the claim, widely repeated by galleries and museums, that her horse paintings helped revive figurative painting for a generation trained on Minimalism. Hauser & Wirth's account of her career notes that the critic Peter Schjeldahl was among those who credited her with that shift, though the exact original wording of his assessment is not available in current sources. Her inclusion in the Whitney's 1978 New Image Painting helped fix the critical framework still used to discuss her work: a painter who treated a single, recognizable image as a vehicle for abstract, physical mark-making rather than illustration. The institutional record backs up that reading. The Albright-Knox retrospective that traveled from 1992 to 1994, the 1999 survey of her 1990s paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the 2009 to 2011 tour of Moving in Place each reaffirmed her standing as a major American painter across four decades, from the horse paintings of the late 1970s to the more allusive, memory-based imagery of her New Mexico years.

Rothenberg's auction market moved decisively higher after her death. Her current record, United States II (1976), sold for USD 1,990,000 at Christie's New York on November 19, 2024, more than 30 percent above her prior high. That earlier record, Diagonal (1975), had sold for roughly USD 1.5 million at Christie's in 2007, meaning her top price stood essentially unchanged for seventeen years before the 2024 sale reset it. Sperone Westwater represented the artist and her estate from 1987 to 2025; since 2025, her estate has been represented by Hauser & Wirth, which mounted The Weather, its first exhibition dedicated to her work, in 2025 and 2026.

No catalogue raisonne for Rothenberg has been identified in current research, so provenance and authentication run through her estate and its representing gallery, a relationship that changed hands in 2025 when Hauser & Wirth succeeded Sperone Westwater. Her market is thin and highly stratified by category: her single auction record for a major painting, set in 2024 at nearly USD 2 million, sits far above results for her prints and works on paper, some of which have sold for a few thousand dollars. Because that record was set four years after her death and only modestly exceeded a price set in 2007, collectors should treat any single result as an imperfect guide to the broader market and pay close attention to medium, scale, and period when comparing works.