Event details 
Wednesday, September 11, 2024
6:30 pm

Dia Chelsea
537 West 22nd Street
New York, New York

Free. Spaces are limited; register here.

Join us for a conversation between Dorothea Rockburne and Dia editor Svetlana Kitto to launch the first in-depth monograph of the artist’s seven-decade career. Published in July 2024, the book considers the full scope and varied range of Rockburne’s elegant yet deceptively simple sculptures, installations, and paintings. Essays explore her time at Black Mountain College and training as an artist; her background in dance including a brief period with the Judson Dance Theater; the physicality of her art as manifested through painstaking work with humble materials like chipboard, cup grease, paper, and linen; her long-standing engagement with mathematics; and her foregrounding of subjectivity and emotion, which puts her in particular dialogue with feminism, Minimalism, and wider contemporary abstraction. Balancing both new scholarship and never-before-published writings, studies, and drawings by the artist, this will be the definitive book on Rockburne’s expansive oeuvre for years to come. The event features a Q&A with the artist and editor, to be followed by a book signing.

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 were deeply influential to her practice. After moving to New York 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. Her works based on set theory, what the artist refers to as “visual equations,” were first exhibited in New York in 1970. Later phases of Rockburne’s painting practice draw on ancient systems of proportion as well as astronomical phenomena. Her work has been featured in two solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1981 and 2013–14); a major retrospective at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York (2011), which traveled to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; and a long-term solo exhibition at Dia Beacon (2018–22). Rockburne resides in New York.